Mrs. Dalloway(1925)

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BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fiction

THE VOYAGE OUT
NIGHT AND DAY

Jacob’s room

MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
A HAUNTED HOUSE

Biography
FLUSH
ROGER FRY

Criticism, etc .

THE COMMON READER

THE SECOND COMMON READER

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

THREE GUINEAS

THE DEATH OF THE MOTH

THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAY,*?

MRS. DALLOWAY

MRS. D ALLOW AY

by

VIRGINIA WOOLF

-Heme

New York

HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC

RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF

All rights reserved , including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

T. 5.67

^PRINTED Ilf THE UNITED STATES OT AMERICA

MRS. DALLOWAY

Mrs. Dalloway said ^he would buy the flowers
herself.

For Lucy had her w< rk cut out for her. The
doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpel-
mayer’s men were con ing. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if
issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had
always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak
of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had
burst open the French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,
stiller than this of course, the air was in the early
morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a
wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen
as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, stand-
ing there at the open window, that something awful
was about to happen ; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks
rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter

3

MRS. DALLOWAY

4

Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” — was
that it? — “I prefer men to cauliflowers” — was that
it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning
when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter
Walsh. He would be back from India one of these
days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remem-
bered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his
grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly
vanished — how strange it was! — a few sayings like
this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for
Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope
Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know
people who live next door to one in Westminster);
a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green,
light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and
grown very white since her illness. There she
perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very
upright.

For having lived in Westminster — how many
years now? over twenty, — one feels even in the
midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa
was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might
be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) be*

MRS. DALLOWAY

5

fore Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
The lea den circles dissolved in the air . Such fools
we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For
Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one
sees it so, making it up, building it round one,
tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but
the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the
same; can’t be dealt with she felt positive, by Acts
of Parliament for that v»ry reason: they love life.
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge;
in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor
cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and
swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the
triumph and the jingle and the strange high sing-
ing of some aeroplane overhead wa s what she lov ed;
life; London; this moment of June.

For it was the middle of June. The War was
over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the
Embassy last night eating her heart out because that
nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House
must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who
opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in
her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was
over; thank Heaven— over. It was June. The

6

MRS. DALLOWAY

King and Queen were at the Palace. And every-
where, though it was still so early, there was a beat-
ing, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket
bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it;
wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning
air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them,
and set down on their lawns and pitches the bounc-
ing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground
and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and
laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even
now, after dancing all night, were taking their ab-
surd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this
hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in
their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the
shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with
their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green
brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt
Americans (but one must economise, not buy things
rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she
did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part
of it, since her people were courtiers once in the
time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very
night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.
But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence;
the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks;
the pouched birds waddling; and who should be

MRS. DALLOWAY 7

coming along with his back against the Government
buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch
box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh
Whitbread; her old friend Hugh — the admirable
Hugh!

“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh,
rather extravagantly, for they had known each other
as children. “Where are you off to?”

“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway.
“Really it’s better than walking in the country.”

They had just come up — unfortunately — to see
doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to
the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads
came “to see doctors.” Times without number
Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing
home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good
deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind
of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, ex-
tremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he
was almost too well dressed always, but presumably
had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife
had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which,
as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite
understand without requiring him to specify. Ah
yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt
very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time

MRS. DALLOWAY

«

of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morn*
ing, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel,
as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravar
gantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of
eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party
to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late
he might be after the party at the Palace to which
he had to take one of Jim’s boys, — she always felt
a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but at-
tached to him, partly from having known him
always, but she did think him a good sort in his
own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad
by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to
this day forgiven her for liking him.

She could remember scene after scene at Bour-
ton — Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match
in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter
made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his
old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to
take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was
really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that
he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners
and breeding of an English gentleman, that was
only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be
intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable
to walk with on a morning like this.

MRS. DALLOWAY

9

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The
mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Mes<-
sages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty.
Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the
very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, bril-
liantly, on waves of that divine vitality which
Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored
all that.)

For they might be parted for hundreds of years,
she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were
dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her,
If he were with me now what would he say? — some
days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly,
without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the
reward of having cared for people; they came back
in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morn-
ing — indeed they did. But Peter — however beau-
tiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass,
and the little girl in pink — Peter never saw a thing
of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she
told him to; he would look. It was the state of the
world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry,
people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her
own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued!
She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the
top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her

IO MRS. DALLOWAY

(she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the
makings of the perfect hostess, he said.

So she would still find herself arguing in St.
James’s Park, still making out that she had been
right — and she had too — not to marry him. For in
marriage a little licence, a little independence there
must be between people living together day in day
out in the same house; which Richard gave her,
and she him. (Where was he this morning for in-
stance? Some committee, she never asked what.)
But with Peter everything had to be shared; every-
thing gone into. And it was intolerable, and when
it came to that scene in the little garden by the
fountain, she had to break with him or they would
have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was
convinced; though she had borne about with her
for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the
grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the mo-
ment when some one told her at a concert that he
had married a woman met on the boat going to
Indial Never should she forget all thatl Cold,
heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she
understand how he cared. But those Indian women
did presumably — silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops.
And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy,
he assured her — perfectly happy, though he had

MRS. DALLOWAY

ik

never done a thing that they talked of; his whole
life had been a failure. It made her angry still.

She had reached the Park gates. She stood for 4
moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.

She would not say of any one in the world now
that they were this or were that. She felt very
young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She
sliced like a knife through everything; at the same
time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual
sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out,
out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the
feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even
one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or
much out of the, ordinary. How she had got through
life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels
gave them she could not think. She knew nothing;
no language, no history; she scarcely read a book
now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was
absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing;
and she would not say of Peter, she would not say
of herself, I am this, I am that.

Her only gift was kno wing people almost by in-
sti nct, she thoug ht, walking on. If you put her in
a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s;
or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the

12

MRS. DALLOWAY

house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them
all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally
Seton — such hosts of people; and dancing all night;
and the waggons plodding past to market; and driv-
ing home across the Park. She remembered once
throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every
one remembered; what she loved was this, here,
now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did
it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards
Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably
cease completely; all this must go on without her;
did she resent it; or did it not become consoling
to believe that death ended absolutely? but that
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and
flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter sur-
vived, lived in each other, she being part, she was
positive, of the trees at home; of the house there,
ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part
of people she had never met; being laid out like a
mist between the people she knew best, who lifted
her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift
the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
But what was she dreaming as she looked into
Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to
recover? What image of white dawn in the coun-
try, as she read in the book spread open:

MRS. DALLOWAY

<•

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in
them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears
and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly
upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of
the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.

There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there
were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs
and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open.
Ever so many books there were; but none that
seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread
in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to
amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up
little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a
moment cordial; before they settled down for the
usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How
much she wanted it — that people should look pleased
as'"she chme In, ClarlSSa tnought and turned and
■wanted back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because
it was silly to have other reasons for doing things.
Much rather would she have been one of those
people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thou ght, waiting to cross, half the time
she did things not simply, not for themselves; but

14 MRS. DALLOWAY

to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy
she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if
she could have had her life over again 1 she thought,
stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even
differently I

She would have been, in the first place, dark like
Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather
and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady
Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; inter-
ested in politics like a man; with a country house;
very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she
had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little
face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself
well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and
dressed well, considering that she spent little. But
often now this body she wore (she stopped to look
at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capaci-
ties, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the
oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; un-
known; there being no more marrying, no more hav-
ing of children now, but only this astonishing and
rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not eves
Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dallo*
way.

MRS. DALLOWAY

U

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in
the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops;
no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop
where her father had bought his suits for fifty years;
a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

“That is all,” she said, looking at the fish-
monger’s. “That is all,” she repeated, pausing for
a moment at the window of a glove shop where, be-
fore the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves.
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is
known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned
on his bed one morning in the middle of the War.
He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and
shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own
daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either
of them.

Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond
Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her
when she gave a party. Elizabeth really cared for
her dog most of all. The whole house this morn-
ing smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than
Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the
rest of it them sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom
with a prayer book! Better anything, she was in-
clined to say. But it might be only a phase, as
Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might

MRS. DALLOWAY

16

be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who
had been badly treated of course; one must make
allowances for that, and Richard said she was very
able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter,
went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she
treated people who came to lunch she did not care
a bit, it being her experience that the religious
ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled
their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything
for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians,
but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensi-
tive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat.
Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired;
she was never in the room five minutes without mak-
ing you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how
poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived
in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or
whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that
grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school
during the War — poor embittered unfortunate crea-
ture! For it was not her one hated but the idea
of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself
a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become
one of those spectres with which one battles in the
night; one of those spectres who stand astride us

MKS. DALLOWAY 17

and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and
tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the
white, she would have loved Miss Kilmanl But not
in this world. No.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in
her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and
feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-
encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute
would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since
her illness, had power to make her feel scraped,
hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well,
in being loved and making her home delightful rock,
quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster
grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!

Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing
through the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.

She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be
greeted at once by button-faced Miss Pym, whose
hands were always bright red, as if they had been
stood in cold water with the flowers.

There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas,
bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carna-

MRS. DALLOWAY

18

tions. There were roses; there were irises. Ah
yes — so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet
smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed
her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had
been years ago; very kind, but she looked older,
this year, turning her head from side to side among
the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with
her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street up-
roar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And
then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses
looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, hold-
ing their heads up; and all the sweet peas spread-
ing in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale —
as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks
came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the
superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black
sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies
was over; and it was the moment between six and
seven when every flower — roses, carnations, irises,
lilac — glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every
flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white
moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over
the evening primroses 1

And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar

MRS. DALLOWAY

*9

to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to her-
self, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this
scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trust-
ing her, were a wave which she let flow over her
and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount
it all; and it lifted her up and up when — oh! a
pistol shot in the street outside! j

“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going
to the window to look, and coming back and smiling
apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as
if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were
all her fault.

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dallo-
way jump and Miss Pym go to the window and
apologise came from a motor car which had drawn
to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mul-
berry’s shop window. Passers-by who, of course,
stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of
the very greatest importance against the dove-grey
upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and
there was nothing to be seen except a square of
dove grey.

Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the
middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side,
to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing m*

20

MRS: DALLOWAY

visibly, maudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sud-
den sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second
before had been utterly disorderly. But now mys-
tery had brushed them with her wing; they had
heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion
was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her
lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had
been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it?
Nobody knew.

Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping
round his arm, said audibly, humorously of course:
“The Proime Minister’s kyar.”

Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself un-
able to pass, heard him.

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-
faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a
shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that
look of apprehension in them which makes com-
plete strangers apprehensive too. The world has
raised its whip; where will it descend?

Everything had come to a standstill. The throb
of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly
dramming through an entire body. The sun be-
came extraordinarily hot because the motor car had

MRS. DALLOWAY ai

stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies
on the tops of omnibuses spread their black para-
sols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with
a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window
with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with
her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one
looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys
on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And
there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and
upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus
thought, and this gradual drawing together of every-
thing to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror
had come almost to t.he surface and was about to
burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered
and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was
he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a pur-
pose? But for what purpose?

“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little
woman, with large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an
Italian girl.

But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the
motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was
it the Queen in there — the Queen going shop*
ping?

92

MRS. DALLOWAY

The chauffeur, who had been opening something,
turning something, shutting something, got on te
the box.

“Come on,” said Lucrezia.

But her husband, for they had been married four,
five years now, jumped, started, and said, “All
right 1” angrily, as if she had interrupted him.

People must notice; people must see. People, she
thought, looking at the crowd staring at the motor
car; the English people, with their children and
their horses and their clothes, which she admired
in a way; but they were “people” now, because
Septimus had said, “I will kill myself”; an awful
thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help ! she wanted to cry
hut to butchers’ boys and women. Help! Only
last autumn she and Septimus had stood on the
Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Sep-
timus reading a paper instead of talking, she had
snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s
face who saw them! But failure one conceals. She
must take him away into some park.

“Now we will cross,” she said.

She had a right to his arm, though it was without
feeling. He would give her, who was so simple,
ik> impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in

’ MRS. DALLOWAY

33

England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece
of bone.

The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air
of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly,
still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides
of the street with the same dark breath of venera-
tion whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister
nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only
once by three people for a few seconds. Even the
sex was now in dispute. But there could be no
doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness
was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed
only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who
might now, for the first and last time, be within
speaking distance of the majesty of England, of
the enduring symbol of the state which will be
known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all
those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday
morning are but bones with a few wedding rings
mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in th e motor
car will thea-be known.

It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dallo-
way, coming out of Mulberry’s with her flowers;
the Queen. And for a second she wore a look of

Hr

MRS. DALLOWAY

extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the
sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with
its blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hos-
pital; the Queen opening some bazaar, thought
Clarissa.

The crush was terrific for the time of day.
Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what was it? she won-
dered, for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omni-
buses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs (Mi
a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous,
more unlike anything there has ever been than one
could conceive; and the Queen herself held up;
the Queen herself unable to pass. Clarissa was sus-
pended on one side of Brook Street; Sir John Buck-
hurst, the old Judge on the other, with the car be-
tween them (Sir John had laid down the law for
years and liked a well-dressed woman) when the
chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed
something to the policeman, who saluted and raised
his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus
to the side and the car passed through. Slowly and
very silently it took its way.

Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she
had seen something white, magical, circular, in the
footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a name, —

MRS. DALLOWAY

*5

the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Min-
ister’s? — which, by force of its own lustre, burnt
its way through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing,
disappearing), to blaze among candelabras, glitter-
ing stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whit-
bread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of Eng-
land, that night in Buckingham Palace. And
Clarissa, too, gave a party. Sh e stiffened. a-H ttle:
so she would stand at the top of her stairs.

I he car had gOM, but it had left a slight ripple
which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and
tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street. For
thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same
way — to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves —
should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or
pale grey? — ladies stopped; when the sentence was
finished something had happened. Something so
trifling in single instances that no mathematical in-
strument, though capable of transmitting shocks in
China, could register the vibration; yet in its ful-
ness rather formidable and in its common appeal
emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops
strangers looked at each other and thought of the
dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in
a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Wind-
sor which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a

26 MRS. DALLOWAY

general shindy, which echoed strangely across the
way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings.
For the surface agitation of the passing car as it
sunk grazed something very profound.

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St.
James’s Street. Tall men, men of robust physique,
well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their
white slips and their hair raked back who, for
reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in
the bow window of Brooks’s with their hands be-
hind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale
light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it
had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they
'Btood even straighter, and removed their hands, and
seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be,
to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done
before them. The white busts and the little tables
in the background covered with copies of the Tatler
and syphons of soda water seemed to approve;
seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor
houses of England; and to return the frail hum of
the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering gal-
lery return a single voice expanded and made sono-
rous by the might of a whole cathedral. Shawled

MRS. DALLOWAY 2f

Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished
the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for
certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot
of beer — a bunch of roses — into St. James’s Street
out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of pov-
erty had she not seen the constable’s eye upon her,
discouraging an old Irishwoman’s loyalty. The
sentries at St. James’s saluted; Queen Alexandra’s
policeman approved.

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the
gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet con-
fidently, poor people all of them, they waited;
looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at
Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her
shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled
out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one,
then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon com-
moners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to
keep it unspent while this car passed and that; and
all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and
thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of
Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the
Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life
divinely bestowed upon Kings; of the equerries and
deep curtsies; of the Queen’s old doll’s house; of
Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and the

28 MRS. DALLOWAY

Prince — ah! the Prince! who took wonderfully,
they said, after old King Edward, but was ever so
much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James’s;
but he might come along in the morning to visit his
mother.

So Sarah Bletchlev said with her baby in her
arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she
were by her own fender in Pimlico, but keeping her
eyes on the Mall, while Emily Coates ranged over
the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids,
the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the in-
numerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentle-
man with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without oc-
cupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley,
who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with
wax over the deeper sources of life but could be
unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally,
by this sort of thing — poor women waiting to see
the Queen go past — poor women, nice little children,
orphans, widows, the War — tut-tut — actually had
tears in his eyes. A breeze flaunting ever so warmly
down the Mall through the thin trees, past the
bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British
breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the
car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car
approached; and let the poor mothers of Pimlico

MRS. DALLOWAY

29

press close to him, and stood very upright. The car
came on.

Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky.
The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the
ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the
trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which
curled and twisted, actually writing something 1
making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.

Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared
straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose,
and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered
behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which
curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But
what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only
for a moment did they lie still; then they moved
and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and
the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a
fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y
perhaps?

“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-
stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby,
lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.

“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a
sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still
in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All
down the Mall people were standing and looking up

MRS. DALLOWAY

30

into the sky. As they looked the whole world be-
came perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed
the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in
this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor,
in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound
fading up there among the gulls.

The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped
exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater —

“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley —
or a dancer —

“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley —

(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked
at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away
it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself
round the broad white shapes of the clouds.

It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There
was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E,
G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as
if destined to cross from West to East on a mission
of the greatest importance which would never be re-
vealed, and yet certainly so it was — a mission of
the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as a train
comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of
the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of
all people in the Mall, in the Green Park* in Picca-
dilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the

MRS. DALLOWAY

it

bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down,
and it soared up and wrote one letter after another —
but what word was it writing?

Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s
side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk,
looked up.

“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr.
Holmes had told her to make her husband (who
had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him
but was a little out of so rts) take an interest in
things outsi de himself.

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they ar e sig-
nalling t(^ me A Not indeed in actual words; that is,
tie could not Tead the language yet; but it was
plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and
tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words
languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing
upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laugh-
ing goodness one shape after another of unimagi-
nable beauty and signalling their intention to pro-
vide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely,
with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his
cheeks.

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a
nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began to

SpCll t...0...f..a

3 »

MRS. DALLOWAY

“K . . . R . . said the nursemaid, and Sep*
timus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear,
deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a
roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which
rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up
into his brain waves of sound which, concussing,
broke. A marvellous discovery indeed — that the
human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for
one must be scientific, above all scientific) can
quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her
hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that
he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement
of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling
with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning
and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow
wave, like plumes on horses’ heads, feathers on
ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly,
would have sent him mad. But he would not go
mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no
more.

But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were
alive. And the leaves being connected by millions
of fibres with his own body, there on the seat,
fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched
he, too, made that statement. The sparrows flut-
tering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were

MRS. DALLOWAY

33

part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with
black branches. Sounds made harmonies with pre-
meditation; the spaces between them were as sig-
nificant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far
away a horn sounded. All taken together meant
the birth of a new religion —

“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently.
People must notice.

“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,”
she said.

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes
might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather
would she that he were dead! She could not sit
beside him when he stared so and did not see her
and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children
playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling
down; all were terrible. And he would not kill him-
self ; and she could tell no one. “Septimus has been
working too hard” — that was all she could say to
her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she
thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus
now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his
shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up,
staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he
would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was
brave; he was not Septimus now. She put cm her

MRS. DALLOWAY

M

bee collar. She put on her new hat and he never
noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing
could make her happy without him 1 Nothingl He
w%s selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr,
Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him.
She spread her hand before her. Look! Her wed-
ding ring slipped — she had grown so thin. It was
she who suffered — but she had nobody to tell.

Far was Italy and the white houses and the room
where her sisters sat making hats, and the streets
crowded every evening with people walking, laugh-
ing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled
up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers
Stuck in pots!

“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said
aloud. But to whom?

The*c. was nobody. Her words faded. So a
rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way
into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours
over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hill-
sides soften and fall in. But though they are gone,
the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank
of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out
what the frank daylight fails to transmit — the
trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there
in the darkness; huddled together in the dnrlrnaM;

MRS. DALLOWAY

35

reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing
the walk white and grey, spotting each window-
pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the
red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all k once more
d ecked out to thq( | eyeg {exists Wain. I am alone; I
am alone 1 she cried/ by the fountain in Regent’s
Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as per-
haps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the
country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans
saw it, lying cloudy, whrn they landed, and the
hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not
where — s uch was her darkness: when suddenly, as
if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she
said how she was his wife, married years ago in
Milan, his wife, and would never, n^ver tell that
he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down
she dropped. For he was gone, she thought — gone,
as he threatened, to kill himself — to throw himself
under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting
alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs
crossed, staring, talking aloud.

Men must not cut down trees. There is a God.
(He noted such revelations on the backs of en-
velopes.) Change the world. No one kills from
hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He
waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the

36 MRS. DALLOWAY

railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four
or five times over and went on, drawing its notes
out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words
how there is no crime and, joined by another spar-
row, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in
Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life
beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is
no death.

There was his hand; there the dead. White
things were assembling behind the railings opposite.
But he dared not look. Evans was behind the
railings 1

“What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sit-
ting down by him.

Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.

-Away from people — they must get away from
people, he said (jumping up), right away over there,
where there were chairs beneath a tree and the long
slope of the park dipped like a length of green stuff
with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke high
above, and there was a rampart of far irregular
houses hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a
circle, and on the right, dun-coloured animals
stretched long necks over the Zoo palings, bark-
ing, howling. There they sat down under a tree.

“Look,” she implored him, pointing at a little

MRS. DALLOWAY

37

troop of boys carrying cricket stumps, and one
shuffled, spun round on his heel and shuffled, as
if he were acting a clown at the music hall.

“Look,” she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had
told her to make him notice real things, go to ?
music hall, play cricket — that'“was the very game.
Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very
game for her husband.

“Look,” she repeated.

Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now
communicated with him who was the greatest of
mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death,
the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay
like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the
sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scape-
goat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it,
he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his
hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.

“Look,” she repeated, for he must not talk aloud
to himself out of doors.

“Oh look,” she implored him. But what waj
there to look at? A few sheep. That was all.

The way to Regent’s Park Tube station — could
they tell her the way to Regent’s Park Tube sta-
tion — Maisie Johnson wanted to know. She was
only up from Edinburgh two days ago.

38

MRS. DALLOWAY

“Not this way — over there 1” Rezia exclaimed,
waving her aside, lest she should see Septimus.

Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought.
Everything seemed very queer. In London for the
fast time, come to take up a post at her uncle’s
in Leadenhall Street, and now walking through
Regent’s Park in the morning, this couple on the
chairs gave her quite a turn; the young woman
seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that
should she be very old she would still remember
and make it jangle again among her memories how
she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine
summer’s morning fifty years ago. For she was
only nineteen and had got her way at last, to come
to London; and now how queer it was, this couple
she had asked the way of, and the girl started and
jerked her hand, and the man — he seemed awfully
odd; quarrelling, perhaps; parting for ever, per-
haps; something was up, she knew; and now all
these people (for she returned to the Broad Walk),
the stone basins, the prim flowers, the old men and
women, invalids most of them in Bath chairs — all
seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer. And Maisie
Johnson, as she joined that gently trudging, vaguely
gazing, breeze-kissed company — squirrels perching
and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering for

MRS. DALLOWAY

39

crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each
other, while the soft warm air washed over them
and lent to the fixed unsurprised gaze with which
they received life something whimsical and molli-
fied — Maisie Johnson positively felt she must cry
Oh! (for that young man on the seat had given her
quite a turn. Something was up, she knew.)

Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had
left her people; they had warned her what would
happen.)

Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twist-
ing the knob of the iron r ailing .

That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved
crusts for the squirrels and often ate her lunch in
Regent’s Park), don’t know a thing yet; and really
it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a little
slack, a little moderate in one’s expectations. Percy
drank. Well, better to have a son, thought Mrs.
Dempster. She had had a hard time of it, and
couldn’t help smiling at a girl like that. You’ll get
married, for you’re pretty enough, thought Mrs.
Dempster. Get married, she thought, and then
you’ll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every
man has his ways. But whether I’d have chosen
quite like that if I could have known, thought Mrs.
Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a

MRS. DALLOWAY

40

word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased
pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. For
it’s been a hard life, thought Mrs. Dempster. What
hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet
too. (She drew the knobbed lumps beneath her
skirt.)

Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash,
m’dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and
mating, the bad days and good, life had been no
mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me
tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change
her lot with any woman’s in Kentish Town! But,
she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity
she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hya-
cinth beds.

-Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster
always longed to see foreign parts? She had a
nephew, a missionary. It soared and shot. She
always went on the sea at Margate, not out o’ sight
of land, but she had no patience with women who
were afraid of water. It swept and fell. Her stom-
ach was in her mouth. Up again. There’s a fine
young feller aboard of it, Mrs. Dempster wagered,
and away and away it went, fast and fading, away
and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over Green-
wich and all the masts; over the little island of

MRS. DALLOWAY

4 *

grey churches, St. Paxil’s and the rest till, on either
side of London, fields spread out and dark brown
woods where adventurous thrushes hopping boldly,
glancing quickly, snatched the snail and tapped him
on a stone, once, twice, thrice.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was
nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concen-
tration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley,
vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich)
of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr.
Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get out-
side his body, beyond his house, by means of
thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the
Mendelian theory — away the aeroplane shot.

Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man
carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitated, for within was what
balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with
banners waving over them, tokens of victories not
over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit
of truth seeking which leaves me at present with-
out a situation, and more than that, the cathedral
offers company, he thought, invites you to mem-
bership of a society; great men belong to it;
martyrs have died for it; why not enter in, he
thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlet*

4a MRS. DALLOWAY

before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something
which has soared beyond seeking and questing and
knocking of words together and has become all
spirit, disembodied, ghostly — why not enter in? he
thought and while he hesitated out flew the aero-
plane over Ludgate Circus.

It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to
be heard above the traffic. Unguided it seemed;
sped of its own free will. And now, curving up and
up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy,
ha pure delight, out from behind poured white smoke
looping, writing a T, an O, an F.

“What are they looking at?” said Clarissa Dallo
way to the maid who opened her door.

* The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs.
Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the
maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of
Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the
world and feels fold round her the familiar veils
and the response to old devotions. The cook
whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the
typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head
over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence,
felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she
took the pad with the telephone message on it, how

MRS' DALLOWAY 43

moments like this are buds on the tree of life,
flowers of darkness they are, s he th ought- (as if
some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only) ;
not for a moment did she believe in God; but all
the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one
repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and
canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who
was the foundation of it — of the gay sounds, of the
green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs.
Walker was Irish and whistled all day long — one
must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite
moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy
stood by her, trying to explain how
“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am ’ —

Clarissa read on the telephone pad, “Lady Bruton
wishes to know if Mr. Dalloway will lunch with hel
to-day.”

“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am, told me to tell you he
would be lunching out.”

“Dear!” said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she
meant her to her disappointment (but not the
pang) ; felt the concord between them; took the
hint; thought how the gentry love; gilded her own
future with calm; and, taking Mrs. Dalloway ’s
parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which e
Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in th<

MRS. DALLOWAY

44

field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella
stand.

“Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more
4he heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton
asking Richard to lunch without her made the mo-
ment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on
the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and
shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.

Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said
to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her.
No vulgar jealousy could separate her from Rich-
ard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady
Bruton’s face, as if it had been a dial cut in im-
passive stone, the dwiHdiing-of 4i f e ; ho w year~by
year her share was sliced; how little the margin
that remained was capable any longer of stretching,
of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours,
salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room
she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating
one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room,
an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver
before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens
beneath him, and the waves which threaten to
break, but only gently split their surface, roll and
conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds
.with pearl.

MRS. DALLOWAY

45

She put the pad on the hall table. She began to
go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the bannisters,
as if she had left a party, where now this friend now
that had flashed back her face, her voice; had shut
the door and gone out and stood alone, a single fig-
ure against the appalling night, or rather, to be ac-
curate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June
morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some,
she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open
staircase window which let in blinds flapping, dogs
barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself sud-
denly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blow-
ing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the
window, out of her body and hrain whirfi jaow failed,
sfnce Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said
to be extraordinarily amusing, had not ashed her.

Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a
tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window,
came to the bathroom. There was the green lino-
leum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness
about the heart of life; an attic room. Women
must put off their rich apparel. At midday they
must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid
her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets
were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band
from side to side. Narrower and narrower would

46 MRS. DALLOWAY

her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and
die had read deep in Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She
had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow.
For the House sat so long that Richard insisted,
after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed.
And really she preferred to read of the retreat from
Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic;
the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she
slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity pre-
served through childbirth which clung to her like
a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came
a moment — for example on the river beneath the
woods at Clieveden — when, through some contrac-
tion of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And
then at Constantinople, and again and again. She
could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it
was not mind. It was something central which per-
meated; something warm which broke up surfaces
and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or
of women together. For that she could dimly per-
ceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up
Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by
Nature (who is invariably wise) ; yet she could not
resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman,
not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they
often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether

MRS. DALLOWAY

41

It was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older,
or some accident — like a faint scent, or a violin
next door (so strange is the power of sounds at cer-
tain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what
men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough.
It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush
which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one
yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest
verge and there quivered ind felt the world come
closer, swollen with some astonishing significance,
some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin
and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alle-
viation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that
moment, she had seen an illumination; a match
burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost ex-
pressed. But the close withdrew; the hard soft-
ened. It was over — the moment. Against such
moments (with women too) there contrasted (as
she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbofc
and the candle half-burnt. Lying awake, the floor
creaked; the lit house was suddenly darkened, and
if she raised her head she could just hear the click
of the handle released as gently as possible by'
Richard, who slipped upstairs in his socks and
then, as often as not, dropped his hot-water bottle
and swore! How she laughed)

48

MRS. DALLOWAY

But this question of love (she t hought , putting
her coat away), this falli ng in love with women.
Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with
Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?

She sat on the floor — that was her first impres-
sion of Sally — she sat on the floor with her arms
round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could
it have been? The Mannings? The Kinloch-
Jones’s? At some party (where, she could not be
certain), for she had a distinct recollection of say-
ing to the man she was with, “Who is that?” And
he had told her, and said that Sally’s parents did
not get on (how that shocked her — that one’s
parents should quarrel!). But all that evening she
could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an ex-
traordinary beauty of the kind she most admired,
dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since
she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied — a sort
of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do
anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners
than in Englishwomen. Sally always said she had
French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been
with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a
ruby ring. Perhaps that summer she came to stay
at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without
a penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and

MRS. DALLOWAY

49

upsetting poor Aunt Helena to such an extent that
she never forgave her. There had been some quarrel
at home. She literally hadn’t a penny that night
when she came to them — had pawned a brooch to
come down. She had rushed off in a passion. They
sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it
was who made her feel, for the first time, how
sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew noth-
ing about sex — nothing about social problems. She
had once seen an old man who had dropped dead
in a held — she had seen cows just after their calves
were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discus-
sion of anything (when Sally gave her William
Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper).
There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bed-
room at the top of the house, talking about life,
how they were to reform the world. They meant
to found a society to abolish private property, and
actually had a letter written, though not sent out.
The ideas were Sally’s, of course — but very soon
she was just as excited — read Plato in bed before
.■breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley by the hour.

Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her person-
ality. There was her way with flowers, for in-
-stance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases
all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked

MRS. DALLOWAY

5 °

hollyhocks, dahlias — all sorts of flowers that had
never been seen together — cut their heads off, and
made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The
effect was extraordinary — coming in to dinner in
the sunset. (Of course Aunt Helena thought it
wicked to treat flowers like that.) Then she forgot
her sponge, and ran along the passage naked. That
grim old housemaid, Ellen Atkins, went about
grumbling — “Suppose any of the gentlemen had
seen?” Indeed she did shock people. She was un-
tidy, Papa said.

The strange thing, on looking back, was the
purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It
was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was com-
pletely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality
which could only exist between women, between
women just grown up. It was protective, on her
side; sprang from a sense of being in league to-
gether, a presentiment of something that was bound
to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a
catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this pro-
tective feeling which was much more on her side
than Sally’s. For in those days she was completely
reckless; did the most idiotic things out of
bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the ter-
race; smoked cigars. Absurd, she was — very ab-

MRS. DALLOWAY 31

surd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at
least, so that she could remember standing in her
bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot*
water can in her hands and saying aloud, “She is
beneath this roof. . . . She is beneath this roof I”

No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her
now. She could not even get an echo of her old
emotion. But she could remember going cold with
excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy
(now the old feeling began to come back to her, as
she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-
table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunt-
ing up and down in the pink evening light, and dress-
ing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed
the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be
most happy.” That was her feeling — Othello’s feel-
ing, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly
as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because
she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to
meet Sally Seton!

She was wearing pink gauze — was that possible F
She seemed, anyhow, all light, glowing, like some
bird or air ball that has flown in, attached itself
for a moment to a bramble. But nothing is so
strange when one is in love (and w.hat was this
except being in love?) as the complete indifference

MRS. DALLOWAY

5 *

of other people. Aunt Helena just wandered off
after dinner; Papa read the paper. Peter Walsh
might have been there, and old Miss Cummings;
Joseph Breitkopf certainly was, for he came every
summer, poor old man, for weeks and weeks, and
pretended to read German with her, but really
played the piano and sang Brahms without any
voice.

All this was only a background for Sally. She
stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice
which made everything she said sound like a caress,
to Papa, who had begun to be attracted rather
against his will (he never got over lending her one
®f his books and finding it soaked on the terrace),
when suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit in-
doors 1” and they all went out on to the terrace
and walked up and down. Peter Walsh and Joseph
Breitkopf went on about Wagner. She and Sally
fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite
moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with
flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed
her on the lips. The whole world might have turned
upside down! The others disappeared; there she
was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had
been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to
keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something

MRS. DALLOWAY

S3

infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they
walked (up and down, up and down), she uncov-
ered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation,
the religious feeling! — when old Joseph and Peter
faced them:

“Star-gazing?” said Peter.

It was like running one’s face against a granite
wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was hor-
rible!

Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was
being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hos-
tility; his jealousy; his determination to break into
their companionship. All this she saw as one sees
a landscape in a flash of lightning — and Sally (never
had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her
way unvanquished. She laughed. She made old
Joseph tell her the names of the stars, which he
liked doing very seriously. She stood there: she
listened. She heard the names of the stars.

“Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she
had known all along that something would inter-
rupt, would embitter her moment of happiness.

Yet, after all, how much she owed to him later.
Always when she thought of him she thought of
their quarrels for some reason — because she wanted
his good opinion so much, perhaps. She owed him

MRS. DALLOWAY

54

words: “sentimental,” “civilised”; they started up
every day of her life as if he guarded her. A book
was sentimental; an attitude to life sentimental.
“Sentimental,” perhaps she was to be thinking of
the past. What would he think, she wondered,
when he came back?

That she had grown older? Would he say that,
or would she see him thinking when he came back,
that she had grown older? It was true. Since her
illness she had turned almost white.

Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden
spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had
had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet.
She had just broken into her fifty-second year.
Months and months of it were still untouched. June,
July, August! Each still remained almost whole,
and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (cross-
ing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very
heart of the moment, transfixed it, there — the mo-
ment of this June morning on which was the
pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass,
the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collect-
ing the whole of her at one point (as she looked
into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the
woman who was that very night to give a party; of
Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.

MRS. DALLOWAY

55

How many million times she had seen her face,
and always with the same imperceptible contrac-
tion! She pursed her lips when she looked in the
glass. It was to give her face point. That was her
self — pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self
when some effort, some call on her to be her self,
drew the parts together, she alone knew how dif-
ferent, how incompatible and composed so for the
world only into one cent re, one diamond, one
woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a
meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull
lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps;
she had helped young people, who were grateful to
her; had tried to be the same always, never show-
ing a sign of all the other sides of her — faults, jeal-
ousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton
not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (comb-
ing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now, where
was her dress?

Her evening dresses hung in the cupboard.
Clarissa, plunging her hand into the softness, gently
detached the green dress and carried it to the win-
dow. She had torn it. Some one had trod on the
skirt. She had felt it give at the Embassy party
at the top among the folds. By artificial light the
green shone, but lost its colour now in the sun. Sh6

56 MRS. DALLOWAY

would mend it. Her maids had too much to do.
She would wear it to-night. She would take her
silks, her scissors, her — what was it? — her thimble,
of course, down into the drawing-room, for she must
also write, and see that things generally were more
or less in order.

Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, and
assembling that diamond shape, that single person,
strange how a mistress knows the very moment, the
very temper of her house! Faint sounds rose in
spirals up the well of the stairs; the swish of a
mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front
door opened; a voice repeating a message in the
basement; the chink of silver on a tray; clean silver
for the party. All was for the party.

(And Lucy, coming into the drawing-room with
her tray held out, put the giant candlesticks on the
mantelpiece, the silver casket in the middle, turned
the crystal dolphin towards the clock. They would
come; they would stand; they would talk in the
mincing tones which she could imitate, ladies and
gentlemen. Of all, her mistress was loveliest — mis-
tress of silver, of linen, of china, for the sun, the
silver, doors off their hinges, Rumpelmayer’s men,
gave her a sense, as she laid the paper-knife on the
inlaid table, of something achieved. Behold! Be-

MRS. DALLOWAY 57

hold! she said, speaking to her old friends in the
baker’s shop, where she had first seen service at
Caterham, prying into the glass. She was Lady
Angela, attending Princess Mary, when in came
Mrs. Dalloway.)

“Oh Lucy,” she said, “the silver does look nice!”

“And how,” she said, turning the crystal dolphin
to stand straight, “how did you enjoy the play last
night?” “Oh, they had to go before the end!” she
said. “They had to be back at ten!” she said. “So
they don’t know what happened,” she said. “That
does seem hard luck,” she said (for her servants
stayed later, if they asked her). “That does seem
rather a shame,” she said, taking the old bald-look-
ing cushion in the middle of the sofa and putting it
in Lucy’s arms, and giving her a little push, and
crying:

“Take it away! Give it to Mrs. Walker with my
compliments! Take it away!” she cried.

And Lucy stopped at the drawing-room door,
holding the cushion, and said, very shyly, turning
a little pink, Couldn’t she help to mend that dress?

But, said Mrs. Dalloway, she had enough on her
hands already, quite enough of her own to do with-
out that.

“But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs

MRS. DALLOWAY

S 8

Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on
saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over
her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank
you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants
generally for helping her to be like this, to be what
she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants
liked her. And then this dress of hers — where was
the tear? and now her needle to be threaded. This
was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the last
almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now re-
tired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment,
thought Clarissa (but never would she have a mo-
ment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing.
For she was a character, thought Clarissa, a real
artist. She thought of little out-of-the-way things;
.yet her dresses were never queer. You could wear
them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had
worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace.

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her
needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause,
collected the green folds together and attached them,
very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day
waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and
fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that
is all” more and more ponderously, until even the
heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach

MRS. DALLOWAY

39

says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart.
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden
to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows,
and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body
alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking;
the dog barking, far aw ty barking and barking.

“Heavens, the front-door bell!” exclaimed
Clarissa, staying her needle. Roused, she lis-
tened.

“Mrs. Dalloway will see me,” said the elderly
man in the hall. “Oh yes, she will see me,” he
repeated, putting Lucy aside very benevolently, and
running upstairs ever so quickly. “Yes, yes, yes,”
he muttered as he ran upstairs. “She will see me.
After five years in India, Clarissa will see me.”

“Who can — what can,” asked Mrs. Dalloway
(thinking it was outrageous to be interrupted at
eleven o’clock on the morning of the day she was
giving a party), hearing a step on the stairs. She
heard a hand upon the door. She made to hide her
dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting
privacy. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the
door opened, and in came — for a single second she
could not remember what he was called! so sur-
prised she was to see him, so glad, so shy, so utterly
taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to her un*

60 MRS. DALLOWAY

expectedly in the morning 1 (She had not read his
letter.)

“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively
trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her
hands. She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down.
I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for
she’s grown older. She’s looking at me, he thought,
a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though
he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his
pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half
opened the blade.

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same
queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the
straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps,
but he looks awfully well, and just the same.

“How heavenly it is to see you again!” she ex-
claimed. He had his knife out. That’s so like him,
she thought.

He had only reached town last night, he said;
would have to go down into the country at once;
and how was everything, how was everybody—
Richard? Elizabeth?

“And what’s all this?” he said, tilting his pen-
knife towards her green dress.

He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he
«%ays criticises me.

MRS. DALLOWAY 6t

Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress
as usual, he thought; here she’s been sitting all the
time I’ve been in India; mending her dress; playing
about; going to parties; running to the House and
back and all that, he thought, growing more and
more irritated, more and more agitated, for there’s
nothing in the world so bad for some women as
marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a
Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard.
So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with
a snap.

“Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Commit-
tee,” said Clarissa.

And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind
her just finishing what she was doing to her dress,
for they had a party that night?

“Which I shan’t ask you to,” she said. “My dear
Peter!” she said.

But it was delicious to hear her say that — my
dear Peter! Indeed, it was all so delicious — the
silver, the chairs; all so delicious!

Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he
asked.

Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting!
perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how im-
possible it was ever to make up my mind — and why

MRS. DALLOWAY

6 *

did I make up my mind — not to marry him? she
wondered, that awful summer?

“But it’s so extraordinary that you should have
come this morning 1” she cried, putting her hands,
one on top of another, down on her dress.

“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds
used to flap at Bourton?”

“They did,” he said; and he remembered break-
fasting alone, very awkwardly, with her father; who
had died; and he had not written to Clarissa. But
he had never got on well with old Parry, that queru-
lous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa’s father, Justin
Parry.

“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,”
he said.

„ “But he never liked any one who — our friends,”
said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for
thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry
her.

Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke
my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with
his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from
a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the
sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever
been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were
sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards

MRS. DALLOWAY 63

Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall.
There above them it hung, that moon. She too
seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the
moonlight.

“Herbert has it now,” she said. “I never go there
now,” she said.

Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moon-
light, when one person begins to feel ashamed that
he is already bored, and yet as the other sits silent,
very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like
to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices
some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says
nothing — so Peter Walsh did now. For why go
back like this to the past? he thought. Why make
him think of it again? Why make him suffer, when
she had tortured him so infernally? Why?

“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an
abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion
which caught her heart, made the muscles of her
throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as
she said “lake.” For she was a child, throwing
bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the
same time a grown woman coming to her parents
who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms
which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger
in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete

MRS. DALLOWAY

6 +

life, which she put down by them and said, “This
is what I have made of it! This!” And what had
she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing
this morning with Peter.

She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing
through all that time and that emotion, reached
him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose
and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and
rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped
her eyes.

“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as
if she drew up to the surface something which posi-
tively hurt him as it rose. Stopl Stop! he wanted
to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over;
not by any means. He was only just past fifty.
Shall I tell her, he thought, or not? He would like
to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too cold,
he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would
look ordinary beside Clarissa. And she would think
me a failure, which I am in their sense, he thought;
in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt
about that; he was a failure, compared with all
this — the inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife, the
dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-covers and
the old valuable English tinted prints — he was a

MRS. DALLOWAY 63

failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair,
he thought; Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save
that she married him. (Here Lucy came into the
room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming,
slender, graceful she looked, he thought, as she
stooped to put it down.) And this has been going
on all the time! he thought; week after week;
Clarissa’s life; while I — he thought; and at once
everything seemed to radiate from him; journeys;
rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love af-
fairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife
quite openly — his old horn-handled knife which
Clarissa could swear he had had these thirty years —
and clenched his fist upon it.

What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa
thought; always playing with a knife. Always mak-
ing one feel, too, frivolous; empty-minded; a mere
silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she thought,
and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen
whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unpro-
tected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit
— it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in
and have a look at her where she lies with the
brambles curving over her, summoned to her help
the things she did; the things she liked; her hus«

66 MRS. DALLOWAY

band; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter
hardly knew now, all to come about her and beta
off the enemy.

“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said.
So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground;
toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks;
their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa,
sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each
other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He
assembled from different quarters all sorts of things;
praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which
she knew nothing whatever about; how he had
loved; and altogether done his job.

“Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged
by the assembly of powers which were now charging
this way and that and giving him the feeling at once
frightening and extremely exhilarating of being
rushed through the air on the shoulders of people
he could no longer see, he raised his hands to his
forehead.

Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.

“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but
to some one raised up in the dark so that you could
not touch her but must lay your garland down on
the grass in the dark.

“In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly

MRS. DALLOWAY

67

to Clarissa Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.”
He had deposited his garland. Clarissa could make
what she would of it.

“In love!” she said. That he at his age should
be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that mon-
sterl And there’s no flesh on his neck; his hands
are red; and he’s six months older than I am! her
eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt,
all the same, he is in love. He has that, she felt;
he is in love.

But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides
down the hosts opposed to it, the river which says
on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be
no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable
egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her
look very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as
she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her needle
held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He
was in love! Not with her. With some youngef
woman, of course.

“And who is she?” she asked.

Now this statue must be brought from its height
and set down between them.

“A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the
wife of a Major in the Indian Army.”

And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled

68 MRS. DALLOWAY

as he placed her in this ridiculous way before
Clarissa.

(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)

“She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two
small children; a boy and a girl; and I have come
over to see my lawyers about the divorce.”

There they are I he thought. Do what you like
with them, Clarissa! There they are! And second
by second it seemed to him that the wife of the
Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two
small children became more and more lovely as
Clarissa looked at them; as if he had set light to a
grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a
lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their inti-
macy (for in some ways no one understood him, felt
\|jith him, as Clarissa did) — their exquisite intimacy.

She flattered him; she fooled him, thought
Clarissa; shaping the woman, the wife of the Major
in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a knife.
What a waste! What a folly! All his life long
Peter had been fooled like that; first getting sent
down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the
boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in
the Indian Army — thank Heaven she had refused to
marry himl Still, he was in love; her old friend,
her dear Peter, he was in love.

MRS. DALLOWAY

69

“But what are you going to do?” she asked him.
Oh the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and
Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were going to do
it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his
pocket-knife.

For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she
cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his
silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the
ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that
annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at
his age, how silly!

I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m
up against, he thought, running his finger along the
blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway and all
the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa — and then
to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those un-
controllable forces thrown through the air, he burst
into tears; wept; wept without the least shame,
sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his
cheeks.

And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand,
drawn him to her, kissed him, — actually had felt his
face on hers before she could down the brandishing
of silver flashing — plumes like pampas grass in a
tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her
holding his hand, patting his knee and, feeling as

jo MRS. DALLOWAY

she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him
and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, II
I had married him, this gaiety would have been
mine all day I

It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched
and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the
tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun.
The door had shut, and there among the dust of
fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests how dis-
tant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin
and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered), and
Richard, Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the
night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for
help. Lunching with Lady Bruton, it came back
to her. He has left me; I am alone for ever, she
thought, folding her hands upon her knee.

Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window
and stood with his back to her, flicking a bandanna
handkerchief from side to side. Masterly and dry
and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lift-
ing his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently.
Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as
if he were starting directly upon some great voyage;
and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts
of a play that had been ;ery exciting and moving
were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them

MRS. DALLOWAY

7 1

and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was
bow over.

Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers
her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-
glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the
street, she rose from tb<: sofa and went to Peter.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she
still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling,
still had the power as she came across the room,
to make the moon, whi( h he detested, rise at Bour-
ton on the terrace in the summer sky.

“Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders.
“Are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard — ”

The door opened.

“Here is my Elizabeth,” said Clarissa, emotion-
ally, histrionically, perhaps.

“How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward.

The sound of Big Ben striking the half -hour
struck out between them with extraordinary vigour,
as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate,
were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.

“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his hand-
kerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying
“Good-bye, Clarissa” without looking at her, leaving
the room quickly, and running downstairs and open-
ing the hall door.

7 3

MRS. DALLOWAY

“Peter! Peter!” cried Clarissa, following him out
on to the landing. “My party to-night! Remember
my party to-night 1” she cried, having to raise her
voice against the roar of the open air, and, over-
whelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the
clocks striking, her voice crying “Remember my
party to-night!” sounded frail and thin and very
far away as Peter Walsh shut the door.

Remember my party, remember my party, said
Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking
to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the
sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben strik-
ing the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in
the air.) Oh these parties, he thought; Clarissa’s
parties. Why does she give these parties, he
thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of
a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his button-
hole coming towards him. Only one person in the
world could be as he was, in love. And there he
was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the
plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in
Victoria Street. All India lay behind him; plains,
mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice
as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone —
he, Peter Walsh; who was now really for the first

MRS. DALLOWAY

73

time in his life, in love. Clarissa had grown hard,
ne thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain,
he suspected, looking at the great motor-cars capable
of doing — how many miles on how many gallons?
For he had a turn for mechanics; had invented a
plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows
from England, but the coolies wouldn’t use them,
all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about.

The way she said “Here is my Elizabeth!” — that
annoyed him. Why not “Here’s Elizabeth” simply?
It was insincere. And Elizabeth didn’t like it either.
(Still the last tremors of the great booming voice
shook the air round him; the half-hour; still early;
only h alf-past eleven still.) For he understood
young people; he liked them. There was always
something cold in Clarissa, he thought. She nad
always, even as a girl, a sort of timidity, which in
middle age becomes conventionality, and then it’s
all up, it’s all up, he thought, looking rather drearily
into the glassy depths, and wondering whether by
calling at that hour he had annoyed her; overcome
with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept;
been emotional; told her everything, as usual, as
usual.

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on Lon-
don; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. June

MRS. DALLOWAY

74

Saps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human
frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said
to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty
within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood
there thinking, Clarissa refused me.

Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes
Into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the
hour and finds her guests there already. I am not
late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says.
Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being
the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its
individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back;
some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven,
she says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into
the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring
after ring of sound, like something alive which wants
to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a
tremor of delight, at rest — like Clarissa herself,
thought Peter Walsh, coming down the stairs on the
stroke of the hour in white. It is Clarissa herself,
he thought, with a deep emotion, and an extraordi-
narily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if
this bell had come into the room years ago, where
they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had
gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee

MRS. DALLOWAY

7 %

with honey, laden with the moment. But what
room? What moment? And why had he been so
profoundly happy when the dock was striking?
Then, as the sound of St. Margaret’s languished,
he thought, She has been ill, and the sound ex-
pressed languor and suffering. It was her heart,
he remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final
stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst
of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her draw-
ing-room. Nol No! he cried. She is not dead! I
am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall,
as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending,
his future.

He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As
for caring what they said of him — the Dalloways,
the Whitbreads, and their set, he cared not a straw —
not a straw (though it was true he would have,
some time or other, to see whether Richard couldn’t
help him to some job). Striding, staring, he glared
at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge. He had
been sent down from Oxford — true. He had been
a Socialist, in some sense a failure — true. Still the
future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands
of young men like that; of young men such as he
was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract
principles; getting books sent out to them all the

MRS. DALLOWAY

76

way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; read-;
ing science; reading philosophy. The future lies la
the hands of young men like that, he thought.

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came
from behind, and with it a rustling, regular thud-
ding sound, which as it overtook him drummed his
thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his
doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched
With their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms
Stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters
of a legend written round the base of a statue prais-
ing duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.

It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step
with them, a very fine training. But they did not
took robust. They were weedy for the most part,
boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind
bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they
wore on them unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily
preoccupations the solemnity of the wreath which
they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the
empty tomb. They had taken their vow. The
traffic respected it; vans were stopped.

I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought,
as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on
they marched, past him, past every one, in their
steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uni*

MRS. DALLOWAY

77

tormly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences,
had been laid under a pavement of monuments and
wreaths and drugged into a st i ff ye t staring corpse
by discipline. One had to respect it; one might
laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There
they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge
of the pavement; and all the exalted statues, Nelson,
Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images
of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if
they too had made the same renunciation (Peter
Walsh felt he too had made it, the great renuncia-
tion), trampled under the same temptations, and
achieved at length a marble stare. But the stare
Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least;
though he could respect it in others. He could re-
spect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of
the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys dis-
appeared in the direction of the Strand — all that
I’ve been through, he thought, crossing the road,
and standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom
as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely
with one leg raised and his arms crossed,- — poor
Gordon, he thought.

And just because nobody yet knew he was in
London, except Clarissa, and the earth, after the
voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strange*

*8 MRS. DALLOWAY

ness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past
eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him. What
is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one
do it? he thought, the divorce seeming all moon-
shine. And down his mind went flat as a marsh,
and three great emotions bowled over him; under-
standing; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if
the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite
delight; as if inside his brain by another hand
strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having
nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of
endless avenues, down which if he chose he might
wander. He had not felt so young for years.

He had escaped! was utterly free — as happens in
the downfall of habit when the mind, like an un-
guarded flame, bows and bends and seems about
to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young
for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course
for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was,
and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and
sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong
window. But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he
thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the
direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman
who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter
Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil

MRS. DALLOWAY

79

after veil, until she became the very woman he had
always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but
discreet; black, but enchanting.

Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his
pocket-knife he started after her to follow this
woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its
back turned to shed on him a light which connected
them, which singled him ont, as if the random up-
roar of the traffic had whi-pered through hollowed
hands his name, not Petei, but his private name
which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,”
she said, only “you,” saying it with her white gloves
and her shoulders. Then the thin long cloak which
the wind stirred as she walked past Dent’s shop in
Cockspur Street blew out with an enveloping kind-
ness, a mournful tenderness, as of arms that would
open and take the tired —

But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young,
thought Peter, the red carnation he had seen her
wear as she came across Trafalgar Square burning
again in his eyes and making her lips red. But she
waited at the kerbstone. There was a dignity about
her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich,
like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she
moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flicker-
ing tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must

80 MRS. DALLOWAY

allow oneself a little diversion), a cool waiting wit,
a darting wit; not noisy.

She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To
embarrass her was the last thing he wished. Still
if she stopped he would say “Come and have an
Ice,” he would say, and she would answer, perfectly
simply, “Oh yes.”

But other people got between them in the street,
obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she
changed. There was colour in her cheeks; mockery
in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he
thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last
night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of
all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns,
pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and re-
spectability and evening parties and spruce old men
'wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats. He
was a buccaneer. On and on she went, across Picca-
dilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak,
her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes
and the laces and the feather boas in the windows
to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which
dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as
the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over
hedges in the darkness.

Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford

MRS. DALLOWAY 8t

Street and Great Portland Street and turned down
one of the little streets, and now, and now, the great
moment was approaching, for now she slackened,
opened her bag, and with one look in his direction,
but not at him, one look that bade farewell,
summed up the whole situation and dismissed it
triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key, opened
the door, and gone! Clarissa’s voice saying, Re-
member my party, Remember my party, sang in
his ears. The house was one of those flat red houses
with hanging flower-baskets of vague impropriety.
It was over.

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought,
looking up at the swinging baskets of pale gera-
niums. And it was smashed to atoms — his fun, for
it was half made up, as he knew very well; in-
vented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one
makes up the better part of life, he thought — mak-
ing oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite
amusement, and something more. But odd it was,
and quite true; all this one could never share — it
smashed to atoms.

He turned; went up the street, thinking to find
somewhere to sit, till it was time for Lincoln’s Inn —
for Messrs. Hooper and Grateley. Where should he
go? No matter. Up the street, then, towards

82 MRS. DALLOWAY

Regent’s Park. His boots on the pavement struck
out “no matter”; for it was early, still very
early.

It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse
of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the
streets. There was no fumbling — no hesitation.
Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually,
noiselessly, there, precisely at the right instant, the
motor-car stopped at the door. The girl, silk-
stockinged, feathered, evanescent, but not to him
particularly attractive (for he had had his fling),
alighted. Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls
laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds
blowing, Peter saw through the opened door and
approved of. A splendid achievement in its own
way, after all, London; the season; civilisation.
•Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian
family which for at least three generations had ad-
ministered the affairs of a continent (it’s strange,
he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, dis-
liking India, and empire, and army as he did), there
were moments when civilisation, even of this sort,
seemed dear to him as a personal possession; mo-
ments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs;
girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there
it is, he thought. And the doctors and men of bun*

MRS. DALLOWAY 83

aess and capable women all going about their busi-
ness, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly
admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust
one’s life, companions in the art of living, who would
see one through. What with one thing and another,
the show was really very tolerable; and he would
sit down in the shade and smoke.

There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he
had walked in Regent’s Park — odd, he thought, how
the thought of childhood ke« ps coming back to me —
the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women
live much more in the past than we do, he thought.
They attach themselves to places; and their fathers
— a woman’s always proud of her father. Bourton
was a nice place, a very nice place, but I could
never get on with the old man, he thought There
was quite a scene one night — an argument about
something or other, what, he could not remember.
Politics presumably.

Yes, he remembered Regent’s Park; the long
straight walk; the little house where one bought
air-balls to the left; an absurd statue with an in-
scription somewhere or other. He looked for an
empty seat. He did not want to be bothered (feel-
ing a little drowsy as he did) by people asking him
the time. An elderly grey nurse, with a baby asleep

84 MRS. DALLOWAY

in its perambulator — that was the best he could do
for himself; sit down at the far end of the seat by
that nurse.

She’s a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly
remembering Elizabeth as she came into the room
and stood by her mother. Grown big; quite
grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and
she can’t be more than eighteen. Probably she
doesn’t get on with Clarissa. “There’s my Eliza-
beth” — that sort of thing — why not “Here’s Eliza-
beth” simply? — trying to make out, like most
mothers, that things are what they’re not. She
trusts to her charm too much, he thought. She over-
does it.

The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly
"down his throat; he puffed it out again in rings
which breasted the air bravely for a moment; blue,
circular — I shall try and get a word alone with
Elizabeth to-night, he thought — then began to
wobble into hour-glass shapes and taper away; odd
shapes they take, he thought. Suddenly he closed
his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and threw
away the heavy end of his cigar. A great brush
swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it
moving branches, children’s voices, the shuffle of
feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising

MRS. DALLOWAY 85

and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the
plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled
over.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter
Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring.
In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably
yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the
rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral pres-
ences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky
and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of
lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great
hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant
figure at the end of the ride.

By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by
surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation.
Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind,
he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for some-
thing outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble,
these ugly, these craven men and women. But if
he can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists,
he thinks, and advancing down the path with his
eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them
with womanhood; sees with amazement how grave
they become; how majestically, as the breeze stirs
them, they dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves

86 MRS. DALLOWAY

charity, comprehension, absolution, and then, fling-
ing themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety
of their aspect with a wild carouse.

Such are the visions which proffer great cornu-
copias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or mur-
mur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the
green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like
bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale
faces which fishermen flounder through floods to
embrace.

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up,
pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual
thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and
taking away from him the sense of the earth, the
wish to return, and giving him for substitute a gen-
eral peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down
the forest ride) all this fever of living were sim-
plicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one
thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches
as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is
elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked
up out of the waves to shower down from her mag-
nificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolu-
tion. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the
lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my
book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs.

MRS. DALLOWAY 87

Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight
on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her
head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow
to nothingness with the rest.

Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is
soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the
door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his re-
turn, with hands raised, with white apron blowing,
is an elderly woman who sc ms (so powerful is this
infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to
search for a rider destroyed to be the figure of the
mother whose sons have been killed in the battles
of the world. So, as the so itary traveller advances
down the village street where the women stand knit-
ting and the men dig in the garden, the evening
seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august
fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were
about to sweep them into complete annihilation.

Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the
table, the window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly
the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the
cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem
which only the recollection of cold human contacts
forbids us to embrace. She takes the marmalade J,
she shuts it in the cupboard.

“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”

88 MRS. DALLOWAY

But to whom does the solitary traveller mak*
reply?

So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping
baby in Regent’s Park. So Peter Walsh snored.

He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to him-
self, “The death of the soul.”

“Lord, Lord!” he said to himself out loud, stretch-
ing and opening his eyes. “The death of the soul.”|
The words attached themselves to some scene, to
some room, to some past he had been dreaming of.
It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past he
had been dreaming of.

It was at Bourton that summer, early in the ’nine-
ties, when he was so passionately in love with
Clarissa. There were a great many people there,
laughing and talking, sitting round a table after tea
and the room was bathed in yellow light and full
of cigarette smoke. They were talking about a man
who had married his housemaid, one of the neigh-
bouring squires, he had forgotten his name. He had
married his housemaid, and she had been brought
to Bourton to call — an awful visit it had been. She
Was absurdly over-dressed, “like a cockatoo,”
Clarissa had said, imitating her, and she never
stopped talking. On and on she went, on and on.

MRS. DALLOWAY 89

Clarissa imitated her. Then somebody said — Sally
Seton it was — did it make any real difference to
one’s feelings to know that before they’d married
she had had a baby? (In those days, in mixed com-
pany, it was a bold thing to say.) He could see
Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow con-
tracting; and saying, “Oh, I shall never be able
to speak to her again!” Whereupon the whole
party sitting round the tea-table seemed to wobble.
It was very uncomfortable.

He hadn’t blamed her for minding the fact, since
in those days a girl brought up as she was, knew
nothing, but it was her manner that annoyed him;
timid; hard; something arrogant; unimaginative;
prudish. “The death of the soul.” He had said
that instinctively, ticketing the moment as he used
to do — the death of her soul.

Every one wobbled; every one seemed to bow, as
she spoke, and then to stand up different. He could
see Sally Seton, like a child who has been in mis*
chief, leaning forward, rather flushed, wanting to
talk, but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten people.
(She was Clarissa’s greatest friend, always about
the place, totally unlike her, an attractive creature,
handsome, dark, with the reputation in those days
of great daring and he used to give her cigars, which

MRS. DALLOWAY

90

she smoked in her bedroom. She had either been
engaged to somebody or quarrelled with her family
and old Parry disliked them both equally, which was
a great bond.) Then Clarissa, still with an air of
being offended with them all, got up, made some
excuse, and went off, alone. As she opened the door,
in came that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep.
She flung herself upon him, went into raptures. It
was as if she said to Peter — it was all aimed at him,
he knew — “I know you thought me absurd about
that woman just now; but see how extraordinarily
sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob!”

They had always this queer power of communi-
cating without words. She knew directly he criti-
cised her. Then she would do something quite ob-
vious to defend herself, like this fuss with the dog —
but it never took him in, he always saw through
Clarissa. Not that he said anything, of course; just
sat looking glum. It was the way their quarrels
often began.

She shut the door. At once he became extremely
depressed. It all seemed useless — going on being in
love; going on quarrelling; going on making it up,
and he wandered off alone, among outhouses, stables,
looking at the horses. (The place was quite a
humble one; the Parrys were never very well off;

MRS. DALLOWAY

91

but there were always grooms and stable-boys about
— Clarissa loved riding — and an old coachman —
what was his name? — an old nurse, old Moody, old
Goody, some such name they called her, whom one
was taken to visit in a little room with lots of
photographs, lots of bird-cages.)

It was an awful evening! He grew more and
more gloomy, not about that only; about everything.
And he couldn’t see her; couldn’t explain to her;
couldn’t have it out. There were always people
about — she’d go on as if nothing had happened.
That was the devilish part of her — this coldness,
this woodenness, something very profound in her,,
which he had felt again this morning talking to her;
an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her.
She had some queer power of fiddling on one’s
nerves, turning one’s nerves to fiddle-strings, yes.

He had gone in to dinner rather late, from some
idiotic idea of making himself felt, and had sat down
by old Miss Parry — Aunt Helena — Mr. Parry’s sis-
ter, who was supposed to preside. There she sat in
her white Cashmere shawl, with her head against the
window — a formidable old lady, but kind to him,
for he had found her some rare flower, and she was
a great botanist, marching off in thick boots with
a black collecting-box slung between her shoulders

MRS. DALLOWAY

92

He sat down beside her, and couldn’t speak. Every-
thing seemed to race past him; he just sat there, eat-
ing. And then half-way through dinner he made
himself look across at Clarissa for the first time.
She was talking to a young man on her right. He
had a sudden revelation. “She will marry that
man,” he said to himself. He didn’t even know his
name.

For of course it was that afternoon, that very
afternoon, that Dalloway had come over; and
Clarissa called him “Wickham”; that was the be-
ginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over;
and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced
him to everybody as Wickham. At last he said
“My name is Dalloway!” — that was his first view
of Richard — a fair young man, rather awkward,
sitting on a deck-chair, and blurting out “My name
is Dalloway 1” Sally got hold of it; always after
that she called him “My name is Dalloway!”

He was a prey to revelations at that time. This
one — that she would marry Dalloway — was blind-
ing — overwhelming at the moment. There was a
sort of — how could he put it? — a sort of ease in her
manner to him; something maternal; something
gentle. They were talking about politics. AS

MRS. DALLOWAY

93

through dinner he tried to hear what they were
saying.

Afterwards he could remember standing by old
Miss Parry’s chair in the drawing-room. Clarissa
came up, with her perfect manners, like a real
hostess, and wanted to introi luce him to some one —
spoke as if they had never met before, which en-
raged him. Yet even then he admired her for it.
He admired her courage; her social instinct; he
admired her power of carrying things through.
“The perfect hostess,” he said to her, whereupon
she winced all over. But he meant her to feel it.
He would have done anything to hurt her after see-
ing her with Dalloway. So she left him. And he
had a feeling that they were all gathered together
in a conspiracy against him — laughing and talking —
behind his back. There he stood by Miss Parry’s
chair as though he had been cut out of wood, he
talking about wild flowers. Never, never had he
suffered so infernally! He must have forgotten even
to pretend to listen; at last he woke up; he saw
Miss Parry looking rather disturbed, rather indig-
nant, with her prominent eyes fixed. He almost
cried out that he couldn’t attend because he was in
Hell! People began going out of the room. He

94 MRS. DALLOWAY

heard them talking about fetching cloaks; about its
being cold on the water, and so on. They were
going boating on the lake by moonlight — one of
Sally’s mad ideas. He could hear her describing
the moon. And they all went out. He was left
quite alone.

“Don’t you want to go with them?” said Aunt
Helena — old Miss Parry! — she had guessed. And
he turned round and there was Clarissa again. She
had come back to fetch him. He was overcome by
her generosity — her goodness.

“Come along,” she said. “They’re waiting.”

He had never felt so happy in the whole of his
life! Without a word they made it up. They
walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes
-of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her
dress (something floating, white, crimson), her
spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all dis-
embark and explore the island; she startled a hen;
she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew
perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with
her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but if
didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They
sat on the ground and talked — he and Clarissa.
They went in and out of each other’s minds with-
out any effort. And then in a second it was over.

MRS. DALLOWAY

95

He said to himself as they were getting into the
boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any
resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dallo-
way would marry Clarissa.

Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But
somehow as they watched him start, jumping on to
his bicycle to ride twenty miles through the woods,
wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand and
disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively,
tremendously, strongly, al! that; the night; the
romance; Clarissa. He deserved to have her.

For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon
Clarissa (he could see it now) were absurd. He
asked impossible things. He made terrible scenes.
She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he
had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote
him all that summer long letters; how they had
talked of him; how she had praised him, how
Clarissa burst into tears! It was an extraordinary
summer — all letters, scenes, telegrams — arriving at
Bourton early in the morning, hanging about till the
servants were up; appalling tete-b-tetes with old
Mr. Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable
but kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the
vegetable garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.

The final scene, the terrible scene which he be-

96 MRS. DALLOWAY

fieved had mattered more than* anything in the whole
of his life (it might be an exaggeration — but still
so it did seem now) happened at three o’clock in
the afternoon.of a very hot day. It was a trifle that
led up to it — Sally at lunch saying something about
Dalloway, and calling him “My name is Dalloway”;
whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, coloured, in
a way she had, and rapped out sharply, “We’ve had
enough of that feeble joke.” That was all; but for
him it was precisely as if she had said, “I’m only
amusing myself with you; I’ve an understanding
with Richard Dalloway.” So he took it. He had
not slept for nights. “It’s got to be finished one
way or the other,” he said to himself. He sent a
note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by the
fountain at three. “Something very important has
happened,” he scribbled at the end of it.

The fountain was in the middle of a little shrub-
bery, far from the house, with shrubs and trees all
round it. There she came, even before the time,
and they stood with the fountain between them, the
spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly.
How sights fix themselves upon the mind I For
example, the vivid green moss.

She did not move. “Tell me the truth, tell me
$he truth,” he kept on saying. He felt as if his

MRS. DALLOWAY

97

forehead would burst. She seemed contracted,
petrified. She did not move. “Tell me the truth,”
he repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf
popped his head in carrying the Times; stared at
them; gaped; and went away. They neither of
them moved. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated. He
felt that he was grinding against something physi-
cally hard; she was unyielding. She was like iron,
like flint, rigid up the backbone. And when she
said, “It’s no use. It’s no use. This is the end” —
after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the
tears running down his cheeks — it was as if she had
hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, went
away.

“Clarissa!” he cried. “Clarissa!” But she never
came back. It was over. He went away that night.
He never saw her again.

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things.
Still, life had a way of adding day to day. Still,
he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice—
Regent’s Park had changed very little since he
was a boy, except for the squirrels — still, presum-
ably there were compensations — when little Elise
Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to adjj

98 MRS. DALLOWAY

to the pebble collection which she and her brother
were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped
her handful down on the nurse’s knee and scudded
off again full tilt into a lady’s legs. Peter Walsh
laughed out.

But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to her-
self, It’s wicked; why should I suffer? she was ask-
ing, as she walked down the broad path. No; I
can’t stand it any longer, she was saying, having
left Septimus, who wasn’t Septimus any longer, to
say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself,
to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there; when
the child ran full tilt into her, fell flat, and burst out
crying.

That was comforting rather. She stood her up-
right, dusted her frock, kissed her.

But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she
had loved Septimus; she had been happy; she had
had a beautiful home, and there her sisters lived
still, making hats. Why should she suffer?

The child ran straight back to its nurse, and
Rezia saw her scolded, comforted, taken up by the
nurse who put down her knitting, and the kind-
looking man gave her his watch to blow open to
comfort her — but why should she be exposed? Why
not left in Milan? Why tortured? Why?

MRS. DALLOWAY

99

Slightly waved by tears the broad path, the nurse,
the man in grey, the perambulator, rose and fell be»
fore her eyes. To be rocked by this malignant tor-
turer was her lot. But why? She was like a bird
sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf, who blinks
at the sun when the leaf moves; starts at the crack
of a dry twig. She was exposed; she was sur-
rounded by the enormous trees, vast clouds of an
indifferent world, exposed; tortured; and why should
she suffer? Why?

She frowned; she stamped her foot. She must
go back again to Septimus since it was almost time
for them to be going to Sir William Bradshaw. She
must go back and tell him, go back to him sitting
there on the green chair under the tree, talking to
himself, or to that dead man Evans, whom she had
only seen once for a moment in the shop. He had
seemed a nice quiet man; a great friend of Sep-
timus’s, and he had been killed in the War. But
such things happen to every one. Every one has
friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives
up something when they marry. She had given up
her home. She had come to live here, in this awful
city. But Septimus let himself think about horrible
things, as she could too, if she tried. He had grown
stranger and stranger. He said people were talking

loo MRS. DALLOWAY

behind the bedroom walls. Mrs. Filmer thought it
odd. He saw things too — he had seen an old
woman’s head in the middle of a fern. Yet he
could be happy when he chose. They went to
Hampton Court on top of a bus, and they were per-
fectly happy. All the little red and yellow flowers
were out on the grass, like floating lamps he said,
and talked and chattered and laughed, making up
stories. Suddenly he said, “Now we will kill our-
selves,” when they were standing by the river, and
he looked at it with a look which she had seen in
his eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus — a
look as if something fascinated him; and she felt he
was going from her and she caught him by the arm.
But going home he was perfectly quiet — perfectly
reasonable. He would argue with her about killing
themselves; and explain how wicked people were;
how he could see them making up lies as they passed
in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said;
he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the
World, he said.

Then when they got back he could hardly walk.
He lay on the sofa and made her hold his hand to
prevent him from falling down, down, he cried,
into the flames 1 and saw faces laughing at him, call-
ing him horrible disgusting names, from the walls,

MRS. DALLOWAY 101

and hands pointing round the screen. Yet they
were quite alone. But he began to talk aloud, an-
swering people, arguing, laughing, crying, getting
very excited and making her write things down.
Perfect nonsense it was; about death; about Miss
Isabel Pole. She could stand it no longer. She
would go back.

She was close to him now, could see him staring
at the sky, muttering, clasping his hands. Yet Dr.
Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him.
What then had happened — why had he gone, then,
why, when she sat by him, did he start, frown at
her, move away, and point at her hand, take her
hand, look at it terrified?

Was it that she had taken off her wedding ring?
“My hand has grown so thin,” she said. “I have
put it in my purse,” she told him.

He dropped her hand. Their marriage was over,
he thought, with agony, with relief. The rope was
cut; he mounted; he was free, as it was decreed
that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free;
alone (since his wife had thrown away her wedding
ring; since she had left him), he, Septimus, was
alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men
to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now
at last, after all the toils of civilisation — Greeks^

102 MRS. DALLOWAY

Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself—
was to be given whole to. . . . “To whom?” he
asked aloud. “To the Prime Minister,” the voices
which rustled above his head replied. The supreme
secret must be told to the Cabinet; first that trees
are alive; next there is no crime; next love, uni-
versal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, pain-
fully drawing out these profound truths which
needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense
effort to speak out, but the world was entirely
changed by them for ever.

No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his
card and pencil, when a Skye terrier snuffed his
trousers and he started in an agony of fear. It was
turning into a manl He could not watch it happen!
It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a manl
At once the dog trotted away.

Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benig-
nant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But
what was the scientific explanation (for one must
be scientific above all things)? Why could he see
through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will
become men? It was the heat wave presumably,
operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of
evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was
melted off the world. His body was macerated until

MRS. DALLOWAY

103

only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like
a veil upon a rock.

He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld.
He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted,
with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very
high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled
beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh;
their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began
clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor
horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it
cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks
of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music
should be visible was a discovery) and became an
anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shep-
herd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a
penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered)
which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from
his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its
exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath.
This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought
Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows,
and roses hang about him — the thick red roses which
grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself.
The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned
it out, and has gone on to the next public-house.

But he himself remained h fe h on his rock, like a

</K>4 MRS. DALLOWAY

drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of
the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under
the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive,
but let me rest still; he begged (he was talking to
himself again — it was awful, awful!); and as, be-
fore waking, the voices of birds and the sound of
wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow
louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself draw-
ing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing
towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding
louder, something tremendous about to happen.

He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was
on them; a fear. He strained; he pushed; he
looked; he saw Regent’s Park before him. Long
streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees
waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed
to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world
seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically)
wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at
the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty
sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the
rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky
swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in
and out, round and round, yet always with perfect
control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising
sad falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf,

MRS. DALLOWAY

105

now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in
pure good temper; and now and again some chime
(it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the
grass stalks — all of this, calm and reasonable as it
was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the
truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty
was everywhere.

“It is time,” said Rezia.

The word “time” split it< husk; poured its riches
over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like
shavings from a plane, without his making them,
hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach
themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an
immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered
from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly,
Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited
till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans
himself —

“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out.
For he could not look upon the dead.

But the branches parted. A man in grey was
actually walking towards them. It was Evans!
But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not
changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus
cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey
suit came nearer), raising his hand like some

MRS. DALLOWAY

to6

colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man
for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed
to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks,
and now sees light on the desert’s edge which
broadens and strikes the iron-black figure (and
Septimus half rose from his chair), and with legions
of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner,
receives for one moment on his face the whole —
“But I am so unhappy, Septimus,” said Rezia try*
ing to make him sit down.

The millions lamented; for ages they had sor-
rowed. He would turn round, he would tell them in
a few moments, only a few moments more, of this
relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation —
“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is
the time?”

He was talking, he was starting, this man must
notice him. He was looking at them.

“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very
slowly, very drowsily, smiling mysteriously. As he
sat smiling at the dead man in the grey suit the
quarter struck — the quarter to twelve.

And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as
he passed them. To be having an awful scene — the
poor girl looked absolutely desperate — in the middle
of the morning. But what was it about, he won*

MRS. DALLOWAY

ioy

dered, what had the young man in the overcoat been
saying to her to make her look like that; what awful
fix had they got themselves into, both to look so des-
perate as that on a fine summer morning? The
amusing thing about coming back to England, after
five years, was the way it made, anyhow the first
days, things stand out as if one had never seen them
before; lovers squabbling under a tree; the domestic
family life of the parks. Never had he seen London
look so enchanting — the softness of the distances;
the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after
India, he thought, strolling across the grass.

This susceptibility to impressions had been his
undoing no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a
boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good
days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness
from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight
of a frump. After India of course one fell in love
with every woman one met. There was a freshness
about them; even the poorest dressed better than
five years ago surely; and to his eye the fashions
had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks;
the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious
and apparently universal habit of paint. Every
woman, even the most respectable, had roses bloom-
ing under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of In-

io8 MRS. DALLOWAY

dian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a
change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place.
What did the young people think about? Peter
Walsh asked himself.

Those five years — 1918 to 1923 — had been, he
suspected, somehow very important. People looked
different. Newspapers seemed different. Now for
instance there was a man writing quite openly in
one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets.
That you couldn’t have done ten years ago — written
quite openly about water-closets in a respectable
weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge,
or a powder-puff and making up in public. On
board ship coming home there were lots of young
men and girls — Betty and Bertie he remembered in
particular — carrying on quite openly; the old mother
sitting and watching them with her knitting, cool as
a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder
her nose in front of every one. And they weren’t
engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt
cm either side. As hard as nails she was — Betty
What’shername — ; but a thorough good sort. She
would make a very good wife at thirty — she would
marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich
man and live in a large house near Manchester.

Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh

MRS. DALLOWAY

109

asked himself, turning into the Broad Walk, — mar-
ried a rich man and lived in a large house near
Manchester? Somebody who had written him a
long, gushing letter quite lately about “blue
hydrangeas.” It was seeing blue hydrangeas that
made her think of him and the old days — Sally
Seton, of course! It was Sally Seton — the last per-
son in the world one would have expected to marry
a rich man and live in a large house near Man-
chester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!

But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends —
Whitbreads, Kinderleys, Cunninghams, Kinloch-
Jones’s — Sally was probably the best. She tried
to get hold of things by the right end anyhow. She
saw through Hugh Whitbread anyhow — the admi-
rable Hugh — when Clarissa and the rest were at his
feet.

“The Whitbreads?” he could hear her saying.
“Who are the Whitbreads? Coal merchants. Re-
spectable tradespeople.”

Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought
of nothing but his own appearance, she said. He
ought to have been a Duke. He would be certain
to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of
course Hugh had the most extraordinary, the most
natural, the most sublime respect for the British

no

MRS. DALLOWAY

aristocracy of any human being he had ever come
across. Even Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but
he was such a dear, so unselfish, gave up shooting
to please his old mother — remembered his aunts’
birthdays, and so on.

Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One
of the things he remembered best was an argument
one Sunday morning at Bourton about women’s
rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally sud-
denly lost her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that
he represented all that was most detestable in Brit-
ish middle-class life. She told him that she consid-
ered him responsible for the state of “those poor
girls in Piccadilly” — Hugh, the perfect gentleman,
poor Hugh! — never did a man look more horrified!
§he did it on purpose she said afterwards (for they
used to get together in the vegetable garden and
compare notes). “He’s read nothing, thought noth-
ing, felt nothing,” he could hear her saying in that
very emphatic voice which carried so much farther
than she knew. The stable boys had more life in
them than Hugh, she said. He was a perfect speci-
men of the public school type, she said. No country
but England could have produced him. She was
really spiteful, for some reason; had some grudge
against him. Something had happened — he forgot

MRS. DALLOWAY

in

what — in the smoking-room. He had insulted her—
kissed her? Incredible! Nobody believed a word
against Hugh of course. Who could? Kissing Sally
in the smoking-room! If it had been some Honour-
able Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that
ragamuffin Sally without a penny to her name, and
a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo. For
of all the people he had ever met Hugh was the
greatest snob — the most obsequious — no, he didn’t
cringe exactly. He was too much of a prig for
that. A first-rate valet was the obvious compari-
son — somebody who walked behind carrying suit
cases; could be trusted to send telegrams — indis-
pensable to hostesses. And he’d found his job —
married his Honourable Evelyn; got some little post
at Court, looked after the King’s cellars, polished
the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee-
breeches and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is!
A little job at Court!

He had married this lady, the Honourable
Evelyn, and they lived hereabouts, so he thought
(looking at the pompous houses overlooking the
Park), for he had lunched there once in a house
which had, like all Hugh’s possessions, something
that no other house could possibly have — linen cup-
boards it might have been. You had to go and look

1 12 MRS. DALLOWAY

at them — you had to spend a great deal of time
always admiring whatever it was — linen cupboards,
pillow-cases, old oak furniture, pictures, which Hugh
had picked up for an old song. But Mrs. Hugh
sometimes gave the show away. She was one of
those obscure mouse-like little women who admire
big men. She was almost negligible. Then sud-
denly she would say something quite unexpected —
something sharp. She had the relics of the grand
manner perhaps. The steam coal was a little too
strong for her — it made the atmosphere thick. And
so there they lived, with their linen cupboards and
their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed with
real lace at the rate of five or ten thousand a year
presumably, while he, who was two years older than
Hugh, cadged for a job.

At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put
him into some secretary’s office, to find him some
Usher’s job teaching little boys Latin, at the beck
and call of some mandarin in an office, something
that brought in five hundred a year; for if he mar-
ried Daisy, even with his pension, they could never
do on less. Whitbread could do it presumably; or
Dalloway. He didn’t mind what he asked Dallo-
Way. He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited;
a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good

MRS. DALLOWAY

113

sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same
matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of
imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with
the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to
have been a country gentleman — he was wasted on
politics. He was at his best out of doors, with
horses and dogs — how good he was, for instance,
when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa’s got caught
in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa
turned faint and Dalloway did the whole thing; ban-
daged, made splints; told < 'larissa not to be a fool.
That was what she liked him for perhaps — that was
what she needed. “Now, my dear, don’t be a fool.
Hold this — fetch that,” all the time talking to the
dog as if it were a human being.

But how could she swallow all that stuff about
poetry? How could she let him hold forth about
Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard
Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no
decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets be-
cause it was like listening at keyholes (besides the
relationship was not one that he approved). No de-
cent man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s
sister. Incredible! The only thing to do was to
pelt him with sugared almonds — it was at dinner.
But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so honest

MRS. DALLOWAY

ii4

of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if
she didn’t think him the most original mind she’d
ever metl

That was one of the bonds between Sally and him-
self. There was a garden where they used to walk,
a walled-in place, with rose-bushes and giant cauli-
flowers — he could remember Sally tearing off a rose,
stopping to exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage
leaves in the moonlight (it was extraordinary how
vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn’t
thought of for years,) while she implored him, half
laughing of course, to carry off Clarissa, to save
her from the Hughs and the Dalloways and all the
other “perfect gentlemen” who would “stifle her
soul” (she wrote reams of poetry in those days),
make a mere hostess of her, encourage her worldli-
ness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn’t
going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly
clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions
were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very
shrewd — a far better judge of character than Sally,
for instance, and with it all, purely feminine; with
that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of mak-
ing a world of her own wherever she happened to
be. She came into a room; she stood, as he had
often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people.

MRS. DALLOWAY

”5

round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered.
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there
was nothing picturesque about her; she never said
anything specially clever; there she was, however;
there she was.

No, no, nol He was not in love with her any
more! He only felt, after seeing her that morn'
ing, among her scissors and silks, making ready for
the party, unable to get away from the thought of
her; she kept coming back and back like a sleepei
jolting against him in a railway carriage; which
was not being in love, of course; it was thinking
of her, criticising her, starting again, after thirty
years, trying to explain her. The obvious thing to
say of -her waSThat she was worldly; cared too
much for rank and society and getting on in the
world — which was true in a sense; she had admitted
it to him. (You could always get her to own up
if you took the trouble; she was honest.) What
she would say was that she hated frumps, fogies,
failures, like himself presumably; thought people
had no right to slouch about with their hands in
their pockets; must do something, be something;
and these great swells, these Duchesses, these hoary
old Countesses one met in her drawing-room, un-
speakably remote as he felt them to be from any-

n6

MRS. DALLOWAY

thing that mattered a straw, stood for something
real to her. Lady Bexborough, she said once, held
herself upright (so did Clarissa herself; she never
lounged in any sense of the word; she was straight
as a dart, a little rigid in fact). She said they had
a kind of courage which the older she grew the
more she respected. In all this there was a great
deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the
public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, gov-
erning-class spirit, which had grown on her, as it
tends to do. With twice his wits, she had to see
things through his eyes — one of the tragedies of
married life. With a mind of her own, she must
always be quoting Richard — as if one couldn’t know
to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the
iiorning Post of a morning! These parties for
example were all for him, or for her idea of him
(to do Richard justice he would have been happier
farming in Norfolk). She made her drawing-room
a sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it.
Over and over again he had seen ber take some
taw youth, twist him, turn him, wake him up; set
him going. Infinite numbers of dull people con-
glomerated round her of course. But odd unex-
pected people turned up; an artist sometimes; some-
times a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. And

MRS. DALLOWAY

ny

kehind it all was that network of visiting, leaving
fards, being kind to people; running about with
bunches of flowers, little presents; So-and-so was
going to France — must have an air-cushion; a real
drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic
that women of her sort keep up; but she did it
genuinely, from a natural instinct.

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-
going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this
was a theory he used to make up to account for her,
so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in
others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a
doomed race, chained to a linking ship (her favour-
ite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and
they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the
whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our
part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners
(Huxley again) ; decorate the dungeon with flowers
and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can .
Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own
way, — her notion being that the Gods, who never
lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling
human lives were seriously put out if, all the same,
you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly
after Sylvia’s death — that horrible affair. To see
your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin

Ii8 MRS. DALLOWAY

Parry’s fault — all his carelessness) before your very
eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted
of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn
one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps;
she thought there were no Gods; no one was to
blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of
doing good for the sake of goodness.

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It
was her nature to enjoy (though goodness only
■knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch,
he often felt, that even he, after all these years,
mild make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no
bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue
which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed
practically everything. If you walked with her in
Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child
in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama
she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very
likely, she would have talked to those lovers, if she
had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of
comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed
people, always people, to bring it out, with the in-
evitable result that she frittered her time away,
lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of
hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t
mean^ blunting the edge of her mind, losing her dis-

MRS. DALLOWAY

1 19

crimination. There she would sit at the head of the
table taking infinite pains with some old buffer who
might be useful to Dalloway — they knew the most
appalling bores in Europe — or in came Elizabeth
and everything must give way to her. She was at
a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he
was over, a round-eyed, pale -faced girl, with nothing
of her mother in her, a silent stolid creature, who
took it all as a matter of course, let her mother make
a fuss of her, and then said “May I go now?” like
a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with
that mixture of amusement and pride which Dallo-
way himself seemed to rouse in her, to play hockey.
And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably; thought
him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends.
Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old,
Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park,
and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that
the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has
gained — at last! — the power which adds the su-
preme flavour to existence, — the power of taking
hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in
the light.

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on
again), but now, at the age of fifty- three one scarcely
needed people any more. Life itself, every moment

120

MRS. DALLOWAY

of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the
son, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much in-
deed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out,
now that one had acquired the power, the full
flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every
shade of meaning; which both were so much more
solid than they used to be, so much less personal.
It was impossible that he should ever suffer again
as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a
time (pray God that one might say these things
without being overheard!), for hours and days he
never thought of Daisy.

Could it be that he was in love with her then,
remembering the misery, the torture, the extraordi-
nary passion of those days? It was a different thing
altogether — a much pleasanter thing — the truth be-
ing, of course, that now she was in love with him.
And that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship
actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief,
wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was an-
noyed to find all her little attentions — cigars, notes,
a rug for the voyage — in his cabin. Every one if
they were honest would say the same; one doesn’t
want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on
telling women they are pretty; that’s what most men

MRS. DALLOWAY lit

of fifty would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were
honest.

But then these astonishing accesses of emotion —
bursting into tears this morning, what was all that
about? What could Clarissa have thought of him?
thought him a fool presumably, not for the first
time. It was jealousy that was at the bottom of it —
jealousy which survives every other passion of man-
kind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-knife
at arm’s length. She had been meeting Major Orde,
Daisy said in her last letter; said it on purpose he
knew; said it to make him jealous; he could see her
wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what
she could say to hurt him; and yet it made no dif-
ference; he was furious! All this pother of coming
to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t to marry her,
but to prevent her from marrying anybody else.
That was what tortured him, that was what came
over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so
intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising
what she might have spared him, what she had re*
duced him to — a whimpering, snivelling old ass.
But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife,
don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the
meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as ai|

MRS. DALLOWAY

m

icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side,
let him take her hand, give him one kiss — Here he
was at the crossing.

A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound,
a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, be-
ginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with
an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo —

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient
spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just
opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a tall
quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump,
like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves
which lets the wind run up and down its branches
singing

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal
breeze.

Through all ages — when the pavement was grass,
when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and
mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the
battered woman — for she wore a skirt — with her
right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side,
stood singing of love — love which has lasted a mil-

MRS. DALLOWAY

M3

lion years, she sang, love which prevails, and mil-
lions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead
these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her
in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer
days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing
but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle
had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last
she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the
earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she im-
plored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple
heather, there on her high burial place which the
last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the
pageant of the universe would be over.

As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s
Park Tube station still the earth seemed green and
flowery; still, though it issued from so rude a mouth,
a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with
root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bub-
bling burbling song, soaking through the knotted
roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure,
streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all
along the Marylebone Road, and down towards
Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.

Still remembering how once in some primeval
May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump,
this battered old woman with one hand exposed for

MRS. DALLOWAY

K4

coppers the other clutching her side, would still be
there in ten million years, remembering how once
she had walked in May, where the sea flows now,
with whom it did not matter — he was a man, oh
yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage
of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May
day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver
frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored
him (as she did now quite clearly) “look in my eyes
with thy sweet eyes intently,” she no longer saw
brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face but
only a looming shape, a shadow shape, to which,
•jyith the bird-like freshness of the very aged she
still twittered “give me your hand and let me press
it gently” (Peter Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor
Creature a coin as he stepped into his taxi), “and if
some one should see, what matter they?” she de-
manded; and her fist clutched at her side, and die
smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering in-
quisitive eyes seemed blotted out, and the pass-
ing generations — the pavement was crowded with
bustling middle-class people — vanished, like leaves,
to be trodden under, to be soaked and steeped and
made mould of by that eternal spring —

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo

MRS. DALLOWAY

US

“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith,
waiting to cross.

Oh poor old wretch 1

Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father,
or somebody who had known one in better days
had happened to pass, and saw one standing there in
the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?

Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of
sound wound up into the air like the smoke from
a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech trees and
issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost
leaves. “And if some one should see, what matter
they?”

Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks
now, Rezia had given meanings to things that hap-
pened, almost felt sometimes that she must stop
people in the street, if they looked good, kind people,
just to say to them “I am unhappy”; and this old
woman singing in the street “if some one should see,
what matter they?” made her suddenly quite sure
that everything was going to be right. They were
going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his
name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once.
And then there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey
horses had upright bristles of straw in their tails;

MRS. DALLOWAY

ia6

there were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly
dream, being unhappy.

So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren
Smith, and was there, after all, anything to draw
attention to them, anything to make a passer-by
suspect here is a young man who carries in him the
greatest message in the world, and is, moreover, the
happiest man in the world, and the most miserable?
Perhaps they walked more slowly than other people,
and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the
man’s walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who
has not been in the West End on a weekday at this
hour for years, than to keep looking at the sky, look-
ing at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place
were a room he had come into when the family are
away, the chandeliers being hung in holland bags,
and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of dusty
light upon deserted, queer-looking armchairs, lift-
ing one corner of the long blinds, explains to the
visitors what a wonderful place it is; how wonder-
ful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks
at chairs and tables, how strange.

To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of
the better sort; for he wore brown boots; his hands
were educated; so, too, his profile — his angular, big-
nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips

MRS. DALLOWAY

127

altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as
eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that
he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one
thing nor the other, might end with a house at
Purley and a motor car, or continue renting apart-
ments in back streets all his life; one of those half-
educated, self-educated men whose education is all
learnt from books borrowed from public libraries,
read in the evening after the day’s work, on the ad-
vice of well-known authors consulted by letter.

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones,
which people go through alone, in their bedrooms,
in their offices, walking the fields and the streets
of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy,
because of his mother; she lied; because he came
down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands un-<
washed; because he could see no future for a poet
in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little
sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note
behind him, such as great men have written, and
the world has read later when the story of their
struggles has become famous.

London has swallowed up many millions of young
men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic
Christian names like Septimus with which their
parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging

MRS. DALLOWAY

ia8

off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again
experiences, such as change a face in two years from
a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted,
hostile. But of all this what could the most ob-
servant of friends have said except what a gardener
says when he opens the conservatory door in the
morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: —
It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition,
idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the
usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off
the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering,
made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall
in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the
Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.

Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected
bow she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleo~
patra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him
scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as bums
only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a
red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial
over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the
Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed
her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems
to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in
red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking
in a green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the

MRS. DALLOWAY

129

gardener might have said, had he opened the door;
had he come in, that is to say, any night about this
time, and found him writing; found him tearing up
his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at
three o’clock in the morning and running out to pace
the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one
day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Dar-
win, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.

Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr.
Brewer, managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths,
auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents; some-
thing was up, he thought, and, being paternal with
his young men, and thinking very highly of Smith’s
abilities, and prophesying that he would, in ten or
fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the
inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes
round him, “if he keeps his health,” said Mr.
Brewer, and that was the danger — he looked weakly;
advised football, invited him to supper and was see-
ing his way to consider recommending a rise of
salary, when something happened which threw out
many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his
ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and
insidious were the fingers of the European War,
smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in
the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s

MRS. DALLOWAY

130

nerves at Mr. Brewer’s establishment at Muswell
Hill.

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He
went to France to save an England which consisted
almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss
Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square.
There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer
desired when he advised football was produced in-
stantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted;
he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his
officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs
playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper
screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and
then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent,
blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and
growling good-temperedly. They had to be to-
gether, share with each other, fight with each other,
quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia
who had only seen him once called him “a quiet
man,” a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in
the company of women), when Evans was killed,
just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far
from showing any emotion or recognising that here
was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself
upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The
War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone
through the whole show, friendship, European War,

MRS. DALLOWAY

I3l

death, had won promotion, was still under thirty
and was bound to survive. He was right there. The
last shells missed him. He watched them explode
with indifference. When peace came he was in
Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a
courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open,
daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger
daughter, he became engaged one evening when the
panic was on him — that he could not feel.

For now that it was all over, truce signed, and
the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening,
these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not
feel. As he opened the door of the room where the
Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them;
could hear them; they were rubbing wires among
coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buck-
ram shapes this way and that; the table was all
strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scis-
sors were rapping on the table; but something failed
him; he could not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls
laughing, hats being made protected him; he was
assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could
not sit there all night. There were moments of
waking in the early morning. The bed was falling;
he was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamp-
light and the buckram shapes! He asked Lucrezia
to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the

MRS. DALLOWAY

13a

frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she
would hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk,
feathers, what not were alive to them.

“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say,
when they walked out together. Every hat that
passed, she would examine; and the cloak and the
dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-
dressing, over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely,
rather with impatient movements of the hands, like
those of a painter who puts from him some obvious
well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously,
but always critically, she would welcome a shop-
girl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly,
or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and professional
understanding, a French lady descending from her
carriage, in chinchilla, robes, pearls.

“Beautiful 1 ” she would murmur, nudging Sep-
timus, that he might see. But beauty was behind a
pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices, choco-
lates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put
down his cup on the little marble table. He looked
at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in
the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squab-
bling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could
not fed. In the t ea-shop among the tables and~fhe
chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him

MRS. DALLOWAY

*33

— he could not feel. He could reason; he could
lead, Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus,
do put down your book,” said Rezia, gently shutting
the Inferno ), he could add up his bill; his brain was
perfect; it must be the fault of the world then — that
he could not feel.

“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She
liked it, she said. She respected these Englishmen,
and wanted to see London, and the English horses,
and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hear-
ing how wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt
who had married and lived in Soho.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking
at England from the train window, as they left New-
haven; it might be possible that the world itself is
without meaning.

At the office they advanced him to a post of con-
siderable responsibility. They were proud of him;
he had won crosses. “You have done your duty; it
is up to us — ” began Mr. Brewer; and could not
finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took
admirable lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road.

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That
boy’s business of the intoxication of language —
Antony and Cleopatra — had shrivelled utterly. How
Shakespeare loathed humanity — the putting on of

194 MRS. DALLOWAY

clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the
mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to
Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of
words. The secret signal which one generation
passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing,
hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the
table trimming hats. She trimmed hats for Mrs.
Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour.
She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned,
under water, he thought.

“The English are so serious,” she would say, put-
ting her arms round Septimus, her cheek against
his.

Love between man and woman was repulsive to
Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth
to' him before the end. But, Rezia said, she must
have children. They had been married five years.

They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria
and Albert Museum; stood in the crowd to see the
King open Parliament. And there were the shops—
hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in
the window, where she would stand staring. But
she must have a boy.

She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But
nobody could be like Septimus; so gentle; so serf*

MRS. DALLOWAY

*35

•us; so clever. Could she not read Shakespeare
too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.

One cannot bring children into a world like this.
One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the
breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting
emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying
them now this way, now that.

He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a
bird hop, flit in the grass, without daring to move
a finger. For the truth is (let her ignore it) that
human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure
of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs
scour the desert and vanish screaming into the
wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are
plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer
at the office, with his waxed moustache, coral tie-
pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions — all cold-
ness and clamminess within, — his geraniums ruined
in the War — his cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia
What’shername, handing round cups of tea punc*
tually at five — a leering, sneering obscene little
harpy; and the Toms and Berties in their starched
shirt fronts oozing thick drops of vice. They never
saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their
antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared

MRS. DALLOWAY

136

past him; brutality blared out on placards; men
were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once
a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed
for the diversion of the populace (who laughed
aloud), ambled and nodded and grinned past him,
in the Tottenham Court Road, each half apologeti-
cally, yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe.
And would he go mad?

At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daugh-
ter was expecting a baby. She could not grow old
and have no children! She was very lonely, she
was very unhappy! She cried for the first time
since they were married. Far away he heard her
sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it dis-
tinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But
he felt nothing.

'His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only
each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent,
this hopeless way, he descended another step into
the pit.

At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he
assumed mechanically and with complete conscious-
ness of its insincerity, he dropped his head on his
hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people
must help him. People must be sent for. He
gave in.

MRS. DALLOWAY

137

Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed.
She sent for a doctor — Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes.
Dr. Holmes examined him. There was nothing
whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what
a relief! What a kind man, what a good man!
thought Rezia. When he felt like that he went to
the Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day
off with his wife and played golf. Why not try two
tabloids of bromide dissolved in a glass of water
at bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said
Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall, are often full of very
fine panelling, which the landlords have the folly
to paper over. Only the other day, visiting a pa-
tient, Sir Somebody Something in Bedford Square—

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the
matter, except the sin for which human nature had
condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He
had not cared when Evans was killed; that was
worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads
and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered
over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the
morning at the prostrate body which lay realising
Its degradation; how he had married his wife with-
out loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; out-
raged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and
marked with vice that women shuddered when they

138 MRS. DALLOWAY

saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature
on such a wretch was death.

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured,
handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass,
he brushed it all aside — headaches, sleeplessness,
fears, dreams — nerve symptoms and nothing more,
he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even half a
pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for
another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia
would learn to cook porridge.) But, he continued,
health is largely a matter in our own control.
Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some
hobby. He opened Shakespeare — Antony and Cleo-
patra; pushed Shakespeare aside. Some hobby, said
Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own excellent
health (and he worked as hard as any man in Lon-
don) to the fact that he could always switch off
from his patients on to old furniture? And what
a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren
Smith was wearing!

When the damned fool came again, Septimus re-
fused to see him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes,
smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that
charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push be-
fore he could get past her into her husband’s bed-

room.

MRS. DALLOWAY

139

“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting
down by his patient’s side. He had actually talked
of killing himself to his wife, quite a girl, a for-
eigner, wasn’t she? Didn’t that give her a very
odd idea of English husbands? Didn’t one owe per-
haps a duty to one’s wife? Wouldn’t it be better
to do something instead of lying in bed? For he
had had forty years’ experience behind him; and
Septimus could take Dr. Holmes’s word for it —
there was nothing whatever the matter with him.
And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find
Smith out of bed and not making that charming
little lady his wife anxious about him.

Human nature, in short, was on him — the repul-
sive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes wa.‘i
on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly every
day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the
back of a postcard, human nature is on you.
Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape,
without letting Holmes know; to Italy — anywhere,
anywhere, away from Dr. Holmes.

But Rezia could not understand him. Dr.
Holmes was such a kind man. He was so inter-
ested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them,
he said. He had four little children and he had
asked her to tea, she told Septimus.

140 MRS. DALLOWAY

So he was deserted. The whole world was
clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our
sakes. But why should he kill himself for their
sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this
killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a
table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, — by suck-
ing a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely
raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite
alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about
to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isola-
tion full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached
can never know. Holmes had won of course; the
brute with the red nostrils had won. But even
Holmes himself could not touch this last relic stray-
ing on the edge of the world, this outcast, who
gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like
a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.

It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping)
that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke
from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The
dead were with him.

“Evans, Evans!” he cried.

Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes
the servant girl cried to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen.
“Evans, Evans,” he had said as she brought in the

MRS. DALLOWAY 141

tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled down-
stairs.

And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked
across the room, and put the roses in a vase, upon
which the sun struck directly, and it went laughing,
leaping round the room.

She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a
poor man in the street. But they were almost dead
already, she said, arranging the roses.

So there was a man outside; Evans presumably;
and the roses, which Rezia said were half dead, had
been picked by him in the fields of Greece. “Com-
munication is health; communication is happiness,
communication — ” he muttered.

“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked,
wild with terror, for he was talking to himself.

She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her
husband, she said, was mad. He scarcely knew
her.

“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimiis, see-
ing human nature, that is Dr. Holmes, enter the
room.

“Now what’s all this about?” said Dr. Holmes in
the most amiable way in the world. “Talking non-
sense to frighten your wife?” But he would give

14 * MRS. DALLOWAY

him something to make him sleep. And if they
were rich people, said Dr. Holmes, looking ironi-
cally round the room, by all means let them go to
Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said
Dr. Holmes, looking not quite so kind.

It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big
Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern
part of London; blent with that of other clocks,
mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and
wisps of smoke, and died up there among the sea-
gulls — twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway
laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren
Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was
the hour of their appointment. Probably, Rezia
thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s house
with the grey motor car in front of it. The leaden
circles dissolved in the air.

Indeed it was — Sir William Bradshaw’s motor
jar; low, powerful, grey with plain initials inter-
locked on the panel, as if the pomps of heraldry
were incongruous, this man being the ghostly helper,
the priest of science; and, as the motor car was
grey, so to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver
grey rugs were heaped in it, to keep her ladyship
warm while she waited. For often Sir William
would travel sixty miles or more down into the

MRS. DALLOWAY

14 %

country to visit the rich, the afflicted, who could
afford the very large fee which Sir William very
properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship
waited with the rugs about her knees an hour or
more, leaning back, thinking sometimes of the pa-
tient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold,
mounting minute by minute while she waited; the
wall of gold that was mounting between them and
all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely;
they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged
on a calm ocean, where only spice winds blow; re-
spected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left
to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large
dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profes-
sion; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty
greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband,
whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at
Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; in-
terests she had, however, in plenty; child welfare;
the after-care of the epileptic, and photography, so
that if there was a church building, or a church
decaying, she bribed the sexton, got the key and
took photographs, which were scarcely to be dis-
tinguished from the work of professionals, while she
waited.

Sir William himself was no longer young. He

MRS. DALLOWAY

144

had worked very hard; he had won his position by
sheer ability (being the son of a shopkeeper) ; loved
his profession; made a fine figurehead at ceremonies
and spoke well — all of which had by the time he was
knighted given him a heavy look, a weary look
(the stream of patients being so incessant, the re-
sponsibilities and privileges of his profession so
onerous), which weariness, together with his grey
hairs, increased the extraordinary distinction of his
presence and gave him the reputation (of the utmost
importance in dealing with nerve cases) not merely
of lightning skill, and almost infallible accuracy in
diagnosis but of sympathy; tact; understanding of
the human soul. He could see the first moment they
came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were
called); he was certain directly he saw the man; it
was a case of extreme gravity. It was a case of
complete breakdown — complete physical and nerv-
ous breakdown, with every symptom in an advanced
stage, he ascertained in two or three minutes (writ-
ing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a
pink card).

How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?

Six weeks.

Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was noth-
ing the matter? Ah yes (those general practi-

MRS. DALLOWAY

H5

tkmersl thought Sir William. It took half his time
to undo their blunders. Some were irreparable).

“You served with great distinction in the War?”

The patient repeated the word “war” interroga-
tively.

He was attaching meanings to words of a sym-
bolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on
the card.

“The War?” the patient asked. The European
War — that little shindy of schoolboys with gun-
powder? Had he served with distinction? He
really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.

“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,”
Rezia assured the doctor; “he was promoted.”

“And they have the very highest opinion of you
at your office?” Sir William murmured, glancing at
Mr. Brewer’s very generously worded letter. “So
that you have nothing to worry you, no financial
anxiety, nothing?”

He had committed an appalling crime and been
condemned to death by human nature.

“I have — I have,” he began, “committed a
crime — ”

“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia
assured the doctor. If Mr. Smith would wait, said
Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in the

146 MRS. DALLOWAY

next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir
William said. Did he threaten to kill himself?

Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it,
she said. Of course not. It was merely a question
of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest, rest; a long
rest in bed. There was a delightful home down in
the country where her husband would be perfectly
looked after. Away from her? she asked. Unfortu-
nately, yes; the people we care for most are not
good for us when we are ill. But he was not mad,
was he? Sir William said he never spoke of “mad-
ness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion,.

r " —

But her husband did not like doctors. He would
refuse to go there. Shortly and kindly Sir William
explained to her the state of the case. He had
threatened to kill himself. There was no alterna-
tive. It was a question of law. He would lie in
bed in a beautiful house in the country. The nurses
were admirable. Sir William would visit him once
a week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure she
had no more questions to ask — he never hurried his
patients — they would return to her husband. She
had nothing more to ask — not of Sir William.

So they returned to the most exalted of mankind;
the criminal who faced his judges; the victim ex-
posed on the heights; the fugitive; the drowned

MRS. DALLOWAY

147

sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who
had gone from life to death; to Septimus Warren
Smith, who sat in the arm-chair under the skylight
staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court
dress, muttering messages about beauty.

“We have had our little tdk,” said Sir William.

“He says you are very, vt ry ill,” Rezia cried.

“We have been arranging that you should go into
a home,” said Sir William.

“One of Holmes’s homes? ’ sneered Septimus.

The fellow made a distasteful impression. For
there was in Sir William, whose father had been a
tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and cloth-
ing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more pro-
foundly, there was in Sir William, who had never
had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried,
against cultivated people who came into his room
and intimated that doctors, whose profession is a
constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are
not educated men.

“One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said,
“where we will teach you to rest.”

And there was just one thing more.

He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith
was well he was the last man in the world to frighten
his wife. But he had talked of killing himself.

MRS. DALLOWAY

148

“We all have our moments of depression,” said
Sir William.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself,
human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw
are on you. They scour the desert. They fly
screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the
thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorse-
less.

“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir
William asked, with his pencil on a pink card.

That was his own affair, said Septimus.

“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir
William, glancing at the photograph of his wife in
Court dress.

“And you have a brilliant career before you,”
-said Sir William. There was Mr. Brewer’s letter
on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant career.”

But if he confessed? If he communicated?
Would they let him off then, his torturers?

“I — I — ” he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remem-
ber it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it
was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime — what was his mes-
sage?

MRS. DALLOWAY

149

He could not remember it.

“I — I — ” Septimus stammered.

“Try to think as little about yourself as pos-
sible,” said Sir William kindly. Really, he was not
fit to be about.

Was there anything else they wished to ask him?
Sir William would make all arrangements (he mur-
mured to Rezia) and he would let her know be-
tween five and six that evening he murmured.

“Trust everything to me, he said, and dismissed
them.

Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her
lifel She had asked for help and been deserted 1
He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was
not a nice man.

The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost
him quite a lot, said Septimus, when they got out
into the street.

She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.

But what more did she want?

To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour;
and if in this exacting science which has to do with
what, after all, we know nothing about — the nervous
system, the human brain — a doctor loses his sense
of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must
have; and health is proportion; so that when a man

150 MRS. DALLOWAY

comes into your room and says he is Christ (a com-
mon delusion), and has a message, as they mostly
have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill him-
self, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest
in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends,
without books, without messages; six months’ rest;
until a man who went in weighing seven stone six
comes out weighing twelve.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s god-
dess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospi-
tals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley
Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon her-
self and took photographs scarcely to be distin-
guished from the work of professionals. Worship-
ping proportion, Sir William not only prospered
himself but made England prosper, secluded her
lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made
it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views
until they, too, shared his sense of proportion — his,
if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were
women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights
out of seven at home with her son), so that not only
did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear
him, but the friends and relations of his patients
felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that
these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophe-

MRS. DALLOWAY

15 *

sied the end of the world, or the advent of God,
should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered;
Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these
kinds of cases, and his infallible instin ct, this is
madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of proportion .

T3ut~Proportlon has & sister, Tess^smiling, more
formidable, a Goddess even now engaged — in the
heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of
Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short
the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from
the true belief which is her own — is even now en-
gaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and
setting up in their place her own stern countenance.
Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills
of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring
her own features stamped on the face of the popu-
lace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands
preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks peni-
tentially disguised as brotherly love through fac-
tories and parliaments; offers help, but desires
power; smites out of her way roughly the dissen-
tient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those
who, looking upward, catch submissively from her
eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia
Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir
William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly is,

MRS. DALLOWAT

152

under some plausible disguise; some venerable
name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would
work — how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms,
initiate institutions 1 But conversion, fastidious
Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts
most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady
Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under.
It was nothing you could put your finger on; there
had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking,
water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her
smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street,
numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fif-
teen guests of the professional classes, was smooth
and urbane. Only as the evening wore on a very
slight dulness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous
twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion indicated,
what it was really painful to believe — that the poor
lady lied. Ouce, long ago, she had caught salmon
freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which
lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for
power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew
back, peeped through; so that without knowing pre-
cisely what made the evening disagreeable, and
caused this pressure on the top of the head (which
might well be imputed to the professional conversa-
tion, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life,

MRS. DALLOWAY

ISJ

Lady Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his pa-
tients’ ”) disagreeable it was: so that guests, when
the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley
Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was
denied to his patients.

There in the grey room, with the pictures on the
wall, and the valuable furniture, under the ground
glass skylight, they learnt the extent of their trans-
gressions; huddled up in arn-chairs, they watched
him go through, for their benefit, a curious exercise
with the arms, which he shot out, brought sharply
back to his hip, to prove (if the patient was ob-
stinate) that Sir William was master of his own
actions, which the patient was not. There some
weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted; others, in-
spired by Heaven knows what intemperate mad-
ness, called Sir William to his face a damnable hum-
bug; questioned, even more impiously, life itself.
Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that
life was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich
feathers hung over the mantelpiece, and as for his
income it was quite twelve thousand a year. But
to us, they protested, life has given no such bounty.
He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion.
And perhaps, after all, there is no God? He
shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or not

154 MRS. DALLOWAY

living is an affair of our own? But there they were
mistaken. Sir William had a friend in Surrey where
they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was
a difficult art — a sense of proportion. There were,
moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a
brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a
resolute champion. If they failed him, he had to
support police and the good of society, which, he
remarked very quietly, would take care, down in
Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than
anything by the lack of good blood, were held in
control. And then stole out from her hiding-place
and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is
to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the
sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked,
defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received
the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he
devoured. He shut people up. It was this com-
bination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir
William so greatly to the relations of his victims.

But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down
Harley Street, that she did not like that man.

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing,
the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day,
counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed
out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of

MRS. DALLOWAY

155

proportion, until the mound of time was so far
diminished that a commercial clock, suspended
above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially
and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs.
Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis,
that it was half-past one.

Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their
names stood for one of the hours; subconsciously
one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving
one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude
(so Hugh Whitbread rumin ited, dallying there in
front of the shop window), naturally took the form
later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or
shoes. So he ruminated. It was his habit. He
did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead
languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris,
Rome; riding, shooting, tennis, it had been once.
The malicious asserted that he now kept guard at
Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings and
knee-breeches, over what nobody knew. But he
did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on
the cream of English society for fifty-five years.
He had known Prime Ministers. His affections were
understood to be deep. And if it were true that he
had not taken part in any of the great movements
of the time or held important office, one or two

MRS. DALLOWAY

156

bumble reforms stood to his credit; an improvement
in public shelters was one; the protection of owls
in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be
grateful to him; and his name at the end of letters
to the Times, asking for funds, appealing to the
public to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to
abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks,
commanded respect.

A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a
moment (as the sound of the half hour died away)
to look critically, magisterially, at socks and shoes;
impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world
from a certain eminence, and dressed to match; but
realised the obligations which size, wealth, health,
entail, and observed punctiliously even when not
.absolutely necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned
ceremonies which gave a quality to his manner,
something to imitate, something to remember him
by, for he would never lunch, for example, with
Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty
years, without bringing her in his outstretched hand
a bunch of carnations and asking Miss Brush, Lady
Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South
Africa, which, for some reason, Miss Brush, de-
ficient though she was in every attribute of female
sflarm. so much resented that she said “Thank you.

MRS. DALLOWAY

157

he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for
half a dozen years, he had been doing badly in
Portsmouth.

Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway,
who arrived at the next moment. Indeed they met
on the doorstep.

Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of
course. He was made of much finer material. But
she wouldn’t let them run down her poor dear
Hugh. She could never forgt t his kindness — he had
been really remarkably kind — she forgot precisely
upon what occasion. But he had been — remarkably
kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man and
another does not amount to much. She had never
seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa
Dalloway did — cutting them up and sticking them
together again; not at any rate when one was sixty*
two. She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular
grim smile. There was nobody else coming, she
said. She had got them there on false pretences, to
help her out of a difficulty —

“But let us eat first,” she said.

And so there began a soundless and exquisite pass-
ing to and fro through swing doors of aproned white-
capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but
adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised by

158 MRS. DALLOWAY

hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when,
with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there
rises instead this profound illusion in the first place
about the food — how it is not paid for; and then
that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass
and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of
brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed
chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns;
and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise
jocund visions before musing eyes; gently specula-
tive eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical, mys-
terious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the
beauty of the red carnations which Lady Bruton
(whose movements were always angular) had laid
beside her plate, so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at
-peace with the entire universe and at the same time
completely sure of his standing, said, resting his
fork,

“Wouldn’t they look charming against your
lace?”

Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely,
thought him an underbred fellow. She made
Lady Bruton laugh.

Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them
rather stiffly with much the same attitude with which
the General held the scroll in the picture behind her;

MRS. DALLOWAY

159

she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now,
the General’s great-grand-daughter? great-great-
grand-daughter? Richard Dalloway asked himself.
Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot — that was it.
It was remarkable how in that family the likeness
persisted in the women. She should have been a
general of dragoons herself And Richard would
have served under Her, cheertully; he had the great-
est respect for her; he cherished these romantic
views about well-set-up old women of pedigree, and
would have liked, in his good-humoured way, to
bring some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to
lunch with her; as if a type like hers could be bred
of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He knew her
country. He knew her people. There was a vine,
still bearing, which either Lovelace or Herrick — she
never read a word poetry of herself, but so the
story ran — had sat under. Better wait to put be-
fore them the question that bothered her (about
making an appeal to the public ; if so, in what terms
and so on), better wait until they have had theil
coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carna-
tions down beside her plate.

“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.

Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not
like her. Indeed, Lady Bruton had the reputation

i6o MRS. DALLOWAY

of being more interested in politics than people; of
talking like a man; of having had a finger in some
notorious intrigue of the eighties, which was now
beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly
there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and a
table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that
table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased,
who had written there (one evening in the eighties)
In Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance,
perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the British
troops to advance upon an historical occasion. (She
kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when she
said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands
had difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed,
however devoted, were secretly doubtful themselves,
■of her interest in women who often got in their hus-
bands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts
abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the
middle of the session to recover from influenza.
Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was
known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a
well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose
utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course of
a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine
comradeship which went beneath masculine lunch
parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway,

MRS. DALLOWAY i6»

who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet
indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond.

“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said
Hugh Whitbread, diving into the casserole, anxious
to pay himself this little tribute, for he had only to
come to London and he met everybody at once;
but greedy, one of the greediest men she had ever
known, Milly Brush thought, who observed men
with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of ever-
lasting devotion, to her own sex in particular, be-
ing knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without
feminine charm.

“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton
suddenly bethinking her. ‘ Our old friend, Peter
Walsh.”

They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dallo-
way was genuinely glad, Milly Brush thought; and
Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.

Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh
Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway, remembered the
same thing — how passionately Peter had been in
love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper;
made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway had
a very great liking for the dear old fellow too.
Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown
of his eyes; saw him hesitate; consider; which in*

162 MRS. DALLOWAY

terested her, as Mr. Dalloway always interested
her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about
Peter Walsh?

That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa;
that he would go back directly after lunch and find
Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many words,
that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in
love with these silences; and Mr. Dalloway was
always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now,
being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn
her head a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took
the signal, however deeply she might be sunk in
these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncor-
rupted soul whom life could not bamboozle, because
4ife had not offered her a trinket of the slightest
value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing
whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and
Perkins was instructed to quicken the coffee.

“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady
Bruton. It was vaguely flattering to them all. He
had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to their
secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was
impossible; there was some flaw in his character.
Hugh Whitbread said one might of course mention
his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously,

MRS. DALLOWAY i6j

consequentially, at the thought of the letters he
would write to the heads of Government offices
about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and so on.
But it wouldn’t lead to anything — not to anything
permanent, because of his character.

“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton.
They had all guessed that that was at the bottom
of it.

“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave
the subject, “we shall hear the whole story from
Peter himself.”

(The coffee was very slow in coming.)

“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and
there was at once a ripple in the grey tide of service
which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day out,
collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine
tissue which broke concussions, mitigated interrup-
tions, and spread round the house in Brook Street
a fine net where things lodged and were picked out
accurately, instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who
had been with Lady Bruton these thirty years and
now wrote down the address; handed it to Mr.
Whitbread, who took out his pocket-book, raised
his eyebrows, and slipping it in among documents
of the highest importance, said that he would get
Evelyn to ask him to lunch.

MRS. DALLOWAY

164

(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr.
Whitbread had finished.)

Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He
was getting fat, she noticed. Richard always kept
himself in the pink of condition. She was getting
impatient; the whole of her being was setting posi-
tively, undeniably, domineeringly brushing aside all
this unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh and his af-
fairs) upon that subject which engaged her atten-
tion, and not merely her attention, but that fibre
which was the ramrod of her soul, that essential
part of her without which Millicent Bruton would
not have been Millicent Bruton; that project for
emigrating young people of both sexes born of re-
spectable parents and setting them up with a fair
prospect of doing well in Canada. She exaggerated.
She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. Emi-
gration was not to others the obvious remedy, the
sublime conception. It was not to them (not to
Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush)
the liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong
martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of
direct impulses, downright feelings, and little intro-
spective power (broad and simple — why could not
every one be broad and simple? she asked) feels
rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject

MRS. DALLOWAY

i6j

upon some object — it may be Emigration, it may
be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object
round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted,
becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-
glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in
case people should sneer at it; now proudly dis-
played. Emigration had become, in short, largely
Lady Bruton.

But she had to write. And one letter to the
Times, she used to say to Miss Brush, cost her more
than to organise an expedition to South Africa
(which she had done in the war). After a morn-
ing’s battle beginning, tearing up, beginning again,
she used to feel the futility of her own woman-
hood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would
turn gratefully to the thought of Hugh Whitbread
who possessed — no one could doubt it — the art of
writing letters to the Times.

A being so differently constituted from herself,
with such a command of language; able to put
things as editors like them put; had passions which
one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often
suspended judgement upon men in deference to the
mysterious accord in which they, but no woman,
stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put
things; knew what was said; so that if Richard

1 66 MRS. DALLOWAY

advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she was sure
of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat his
souffle; asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they
were smoking, and then said,

“Milly, would you fetch the papers?”

And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers
on the table; and Hugh produced his fountain pen;
his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years’
service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was still
in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers;
there was no reason, they said, why it should ever
wear out; which was somehow to Hugh’s credit,
and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen
expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh
began carefully writing capital letters with rings
.round them in the margin, and thus marvellously
reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense, to grammar
such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt,
watching the marvellous transformation, must re-
spect. Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious.
Richard said one must take risks. Hugh proposed
modifications in deference to people’s feelings, which,
fce said rather tartly when Richard laughed, “had
to be considered,” and read out “how, therefore,
we are of opinion that the times are ripe . . . the
superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population

MRS. DALLOWAY

167

. . . what we owe to the dead . . which Richard
thought all stuffing and bunkum, but no harm in
it, of course, and Hugh went on drafting sentiments
in alphabetical order of the highest nobility, brush-
ing the cigar ash from his waistcoat, and summing
up now and then the progress they had made until,
finally, he read out the draft of a letter which Lady
Bruton felt certain was a masterpiece. Could her
own meaning sound like that?

Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would
put it in; but he would be meeting somebody at
luncheon.

Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a grace-
ful thing, stuffed all Hugh’s carnations into the front
of her dress, and flinging her hands out called him
“My Prime Minister!” What she would have done
without them both she did not know. They rose.
And Richard Dalloway strolled off as usual to have
a look at the General’s portrait, because he meant,
whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a his-
tory of Lady Bruton’s family.

And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her
family. But they could wait, they could wait, she
said, looking at the picture; meaning that her fam-
ily, of military men, administrators, admirals, had
been men of action, who had done their duty; and

168 MRS. DALLOWAY

Richard’s first duty was to his country, but it was
a fine face, she said; and all the papers were ready
for Richard down at Aldmixton whenever the time
came; the Labour Government she meant. “Ah,
the news from India!” she cried.

And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow
gloves from the bowl on the malachite table and
Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite unneces-
sary courtesy some discarded ticket or other com-
pliment, which she loathed from the depths of her
heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned to
Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,

“We shall see you at our party to-night?” where-
upon Lady Bruton resumed the magnificence which
letter-writing had shattered. She might come; or
"She might not come. Clarissa had wonderful
energy. Parties terrified Lady Bruton. But then,
she was getting old. So she intimated, standing at
her doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow
stretched behind her, and Miss Brush disappeared
Into the background with her hands full of papers.

And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically,
up to her room, lay, one arm extended, on the sofa.
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only
drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of

MRS. DALLOWAY 169

clover in the sunshine this hot June day, with the
bees going round and about and the yellow butter-
flies. Always she went back to those fields down
in Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks
on Patty, her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her
brothers. And there were the dogs; there were the
rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn
under the trees, with the tea-things out, and the
beds of dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass;
and they, little wretches, always up to some mis-
chief! stealing back through the shrubbery, so as
not to be seen, all bedraggled from some roguery.
What old nurse used to say about her frocks!

Ah dear, she remembered — it was Wednesday in
Brook Street. Those kind good fellows, Richard
Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had gone this hot day
through the streets whose growl came up to her
lying on the sofa. Power was hers, position, in-
come. She had lived in the forefront of her time.
She had had good friends; known the ablest men
of her day. Murmuring London flowed up to her,
and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon
some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers
might have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy
and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching

170

MRS. DALLOWAY

to Canada, and those good fellows walking across
London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of
carpet, Mayfair.

And they went further and further from her, be-
ing attached to her by a thin thread (since they
had lunched with her) which would stretch and
stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked
across London; as if one’s friends were attached to
one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin
thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy
with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ring-
fcg to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted
with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she
slept.

And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesi-
tated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very
moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa,
let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buf-
feted at the street corner. They looked in at a
shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk
but to part, only with contrary winds buffeting the
street corner, with some sort of lapse in the tides
of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl, morning
and afternoon, they paused. Some newspaper plac-
ard went up in the air, gallantly, like a kite at first,
then paused, swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s veil

MRS. DALLOWAY

171

hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of the
morning traffic slackened, and single carts rattled
carelessly down half-empty streets. In Norfolk, of
which Richard Dalloway was half thinking, a soft
warm wind blew back the petals; confused the
waters; ruffled the flowering grasses. Haymakers,
who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away the
morning toil, parted curtain^ of green blades; moved
trembling globes of cow parsley to see the sky; the
blue, the steadfast, the bla/ing summer sky.

Aware that he was locking at a silver two-
handled Jacobean mug, and that Hugh Whitbread
admired condescendingly with airs of connoisseur-
ship a Spanish necklace which he thought of asking
the price of in case Evelyn might like it — still Rich-
ard was torpid; could not think or move. Life had
thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of
coloured paste, and one stood stark with the lethargy
of the old, stiff with the rigidity of the old, looking
in. Evelyn Whitbread might like to buy this Span-
ish necklace — so she might. Yawn he must. Hugh
was going into the shop.

“Right you are!” said Richard, following.

Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying
necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the
body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a frail

MRS. DALLOWAY

172

shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton’s great'
grandfather and his memoir and his campaigns in
North America were whelmed and sunk. And Milli-
cent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn’t
care a straw what became of Emigration; about that
letter, whether the editor put it in or not. The
necklace hung stretched between Hugh’s admirable
fingers. Let him give it to a girl, if he must buy
jewels — any girl, any girl in the street. For the
worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty
forcibly — buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d
had a boy he’d have said, Work, work. But he had
his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth.

“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh
in his curt worldly way. It appeared that this
DUibonnet had the measurements of Mrs. Whit-
bread’s neck, or, more strangely still, knew her
views upon Spanish jewellery and the extent of her
possessions in that line (which Hugh could not re-
member). All of which seemed to Richard Dallo-
way awfully odd. For he never gave Clarissa pres-
ents, except a bracelet two or three years ago, which
had not been a success. She never wore it. It
pained him to remember that she never wore it.
And as a single spider’s thread after wavering here
and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf, so

MRS. DALLOWAY 173

Richard’s mind, recovering from its lethargy, set
now on his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had
loved so passionately; and Richard had had a sud-
den vision of her there at luncheon; of himself and
Clarissa; of their life together; and he drew the tray
of old jewels towards him, and taking up first this
brooch then that ring, “How much is that?” he
asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted to
open the drawing-room do<>r and come in holding
out something; a present for Clarissa. Only what?
But Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeak-
ably pompous. Really, after dealing here for
thirty-five years he was not going to be put off by
a mere boy who did not know his business. For
Dubonnet, it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not
buy anything until Mr. Dubonnet chose to be in;
at which the youth flushed and bowed his correct
little bow. It was all perfectly correct. And yet
Richard couldn’t have said that to save his life!
Why these people stood that damned insolence be
could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intoler-
able ass. Richard Dalloway could not stand more
than an hour of his society. And, flicking his
bowler hat by way of farewell, Richard turned at
the corner of Conduit Street eager, yes, very eager,
to travel that spider’s thread of attachment between

174 MRS. DALLOWAY

himself and Clarissa; he would go straight to her,
In Westminster.

But he wanted to come in holding something.
Flowers? Yes, flowers, since he did not trust his
taste in gold; any number of flowers, roses, orchids,
to celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will,
an event; this feeling, about her when they spoke
of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke
of it; not for years had they spoken of it; which,
he thought, grasping his red and white roses to-
gether (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the great-
est mistake in the world. The time comes when it
can’t be said; one’s too shy to say it, he thought,
pocketing his sixpence or two of change, setting off
with his great bunch held against his body to West-
minster to say straight out in so many words (what-
ever she might think of him), holding out his flowers,
“I love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle
thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps,
with all their lives before them, shovelled together,
already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he
was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so
many words that he loved her. Which one never
does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly
one’s shy. And Clarissa — it was difficult to think
•S her; except in starts, as at luncheon, when he

MRS. DALLOWAY

I7i

saw her quite distinctly; their whole life. He
stopped at the crossing; and repeated — being simple
by nature, and undebauched, because he had
tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and dogged,
having championed the down-trodden and followed
his instincts in the House of Commons; being pre-
served in his simplicity yet at the same time grown
rather speechless, rather stiff — he repeated that it
was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa;
a miracle — his life had been a miracle, he thought;
hesitating to cross. But it did make his blood boil
to see little creatures of fi\ e or six crossing Picca-
dilly alone. The police ought to have stopped the
traffic at once. He had no illusions about the
London police. Indeed, he was collecting evidence
of their malpractices; and those costermongers, not
allowed to stand their barrows in the streets; and
prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor
in young men either, but in our detestable social
system and so forth; all of which he considered,
could be seen considering, grey, dogged, dapper,
clean, as he walked across the Park to tell his wife
that he loved her.

For he would say it in so many words, when he
came into the room. Because it is a thousand pities
never to say what one feels, he thought, crossing the

176 MRS. DALLOWAY

Green Park and observing with pleasure how in the
shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were
sprawling; children kicking up their legs; sucking
milk; paper bags thrown about, which could easily
be picked up (if people objected) by one of those
fat gentlemen in livery; for he was of opinion that
every park, and every square, during the summer
months should be open to children (the grass of the
park flushed and faded, lighting up the poor mothers
of Westminster and their crawling babies, as if a
yellow lamp were moved beneath). But what could
be done for female vagrants like that poor creature,
stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung herself
on the earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to
speculate boldly, to consider the whys and the where-
fores, impudent, loose-lipped, humorous), he did not
know. Bearing his flowers like a weapon, Richard
Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her;
still there was time for a spark between them — she
laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good-
humouredly, considering the problem of the female
vagrant; not that they would ever speak. But he
would tell Clarissa that he loved her, in so many
words. He had, once upon a time, been jealous of
Peter Walsh; jealous of him and Clarissa. But she
had often said to him that she had been right not

MRS. DALLOWAY

*77

to many Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was
obviously true; she wanted support. Not that she
was weak; but she wanted support.

As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima
donna facing the audience all in white) you canlt
deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise
what does, after all, stand to millions of people (a
little crowd was waiting at tiie gate to see the King,
drive out) for a symbol, absi.rd though it is; a child
with a box of bricks could have done better, he
thought; looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria
(whom he could remember in her horn spectacles
driving through Kensington -, its white mound, its
billowing motherliness; but iie liked being ruled by
the descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and
the sense of handing on the traditions of the past.
It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed,
his own life was a miracle; let him make no mis-
take about it; here he was, in the prime of life,
walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa
that he loved her. Happiness is this he thought.

It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big
Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musi-
cal; then the hour, irrevocable. Lunch parties waste
the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his
door.

MRS. DALLOWAY

178

The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-
room, where she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing-
table; worried; annoyed. It was perfectly true that
she had not asked Ellie Henderson to her party;
but she had done it on purpose. Now Mrs.
Marsham wrote “she had told Ellie Henderson she
would ask Clarissa — Ellie so much wanted to come.”

But why should she invite all the dull women in
London to her parties? Why should Mrs. Marsham
interfere? And there was Elizabeth closeted all this
time with Doris Kilman. Anything more nauseating
she could not conceive. Prayer at this hour with
that woman. And the sound of the bell flooded the
room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and
gathered itself together to fall once more, when she
heard, distractingly, something fumbling, something
scratching at the door. Who at this hour? Three,
good Heavens! Three already! For with over-
powering directness and dignity the clock struck
three; and she heard nothing else; but the door
handle slipped round and in came Richard! What
a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers.
She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and
Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be
extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was
holding out flowers — roses, red and white roses.

MRS. DALLOWAY

179

(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her;
not in so many words.)

But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She
understood; she understood without his speaking;
his Clarissa. She put them in vases on the mantel-
piece. How lovely they looked! she said. And
was it amusing, she asked? Had Lady Bruton asked
after her? Peter Walsh wa> back. Mrs. Marsham
had written. Must she ask Elbe Henderson? That
woman Kilman was upstair^.

“But let us sit down ior five minutes,” said
Richard.

It all looked so empty. All the chairs were
against the wall. What had they been doing? Oh,
it was for the party; no, he had not forgotten, the
party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had
had him. And he was going to get a divorce; and
he was in love with some woman out there. And
he hadn’t changed in the slightest. There she was,
mending her dress. . . .

“Thinking of Bourton,” she said.

“Hugh was at lunch,” said Richard. She had met
him tool Well, he was getting absolutely intoler-
able. Buying Evelyn necklaces; fatter than ever;
an intolerable ass.

“And it came over me ‘I might have married

i8o MRS. DALLOWAY

jrou,’ ” she said, thinking of Peter sitting there in
his little bow-tie; with that knife, opening it, shut*
ting it. “Just as he always was, you know.”

They were talking about him at lunch, said Rich-
ard. (But he could not tell her he loved her. He
held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.)
They had been writing a letter to the Times for
Millicent Bruton. That was about all Hugh was
fit for.

“And our dear Miss Kilman?” he asked. Clarissa
thought the roses absolutely lovely; first bunched to-
gether; now of their own accord starting apart.

“Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,” she
said. “Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves
up. I suppose they’re praying.”

-Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass
over if you let them.

“In a mackintosh with an umbrella,” said Clarissa.

He had not said “I love you”; but he held her
hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought.

“But why should I ask all the dull women in
London to my parties?” said Clarissa. And if Mrs.
Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests?

“Poor Ellie Henderson,” said Richard — it was a
very odd thing how much Clarissa minded about her
parties, he thought.

MRS. DALLOWAY 181

But Richard had no notion of the look of a room.
However — what was he going to say?

If she worried about these parties he would not
let her give them. Did she wish she had married
Peter? But he must go.

He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood
for a moment as if he we re about to say some-
thing; and she wondered wh.it? Why? There were
the roses.

“Some Committee?” she asked, as he opened the
door.

“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was
“Albanians.”

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even
between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must
respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the
door; for one would not part with it oneself, or
take it, against his will, from one’s husband, with-
out losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect —
something, after all, priceless.

He returned with a pillow and a quilt.

“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said.
And he went.

How like him! He would go on saying “An
hour’s complete rest after luncheon” to the end
of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It

1 84 MRS. DALLOWAY

was like him to take what doctors said literally; part
of his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had
to the same extent; which made him go and do the
thing while she and Peter frittered their time away
bickering. He was already halfway to the House
of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, hav-
ing settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And
people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.”
She cared much more for her roses than for the
Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed,
frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had
heard Richard say so over and over again) — no, she
could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the
Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help
the Armenians?) — the only flowers she could bear
to see cut. But Richard was already at the House
of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all
her difficulties. But no; alas, that was not true.
He did not see the reasons against asking Ellie
Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished
it. Since he had brought the pillows, she would lie
down. . . . But — but — why did she suddenly feel,
for no reason that she could discover, desperately
mnhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain
of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall
blades very carefully, this way and that, and

MRS. DALLOWAY 183

searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it
there at the roots, so she went through one thing
and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that
Richard would never be in the Cabinet because he
had a second-class brain (it came back to her) ; no,
she did not mind that; nor was it to do with Eliza-
beth either and Doris Oman; those were facts. It
was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier in
the day perhaps; something that Peter had said,
combined with some depression of her own, in her
bedroom, taking off her hat and what Richard had
said had added to it, but what had he said? There
were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her
parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly,
laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That
was it! That was it!

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now
that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy.
They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that
she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous
people about her; great names; was simply a snob
in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard
merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement
when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was
childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong.
What she liked was simply life.

MRS. DALLOWAY

184

“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking
aloud, to life.

Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered,
exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to
be so obvious became physically existent; with robes
of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath,
whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose
Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties —
what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say
was (and nobody could be expected to understand) :
They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague.
But who was Peter to make out that life was all
plain sailing? — Peter always in love, always in love
with the wrong woman? What’s your love? she
might say to him. And she knew his answer; how
it is the most important thing in the world and no
woman possibly understood it. Very well. But
could any man understand what she meant either?
about life? She could not imagine Peter or Richard
taking the trouble to give a party for no reason
whatever.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and
these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary
they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean
to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very
queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington;

MRS. DALLOWAY

*85

some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say,
in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and
she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could
be brought together; so she did it. And it was an
offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps.
Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of
the slightest importance; tould not think, write,
even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and
Turks; loved success; hate I discomfort; must be
liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day,
ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another;
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one
should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk
in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly
in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough.
After that, how unbelievable death was! — that it
must end; and no one in the whole world would
know how she had loved it all; how, every in-
stant . . .

The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her
mother was resting. She came in very quietly. She
stood perfectly still. Was it that some Mongol had
been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hil-

1 86 MRS. DALLOWAY

bery said), had mixed with the Dalloway ladies, per-
haps, a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in
general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on
the contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale
face; an Oriental mystery; was gentle, considerate,
still. As a child, she had had a perfect sense of
humour; but now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could
not in the least understand, she had become very
serious; like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green,
with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no
sun.

She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but
the door was ajar, and outside the door was Miss
Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in her
mackintosh, listening to whatever they said.

„ Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore
a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was
cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after
all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; de-
gradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be taking
jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich
people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do
him justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway
had not. She had been merely condescending. She
came from the most worthless of all classes — the
rich, with a smattering of culture. They had ex-

MRS. DALLOWAY 187

pensive things everywhere ; pictures, carpets, lots of
servants. She considered that she had a perfect
right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.

She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no
exaggeration, for surely a girl has a right to some
kind of happiness? And she had never been happy,
what with being so clumsy and so poor. And then,
just as she might have had a chance at Miss Dolby’s
school, the war came; and she had never been able
to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be hap-
pier with people who shared her views about the
Germans. She had had to go. It was true that the
family was of German origin ; spelt the name Kiehl-
man in the eighteenth century; but her brother had
been killed. They turned her out because she would
not pretend that the Germans were all villains —
when she had German friends, when the only happy
days of her life had been spent in Germany! And
after all, she could read history. She had had to
take whatever she could get. Mr. Dalloway had
come across her working for the Friends. He had
allowed her (and that was really generous of him)
to teach his daughter history. Also she did a little
Extension lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had
come to her (and here she always bowed her head).
She had seen the light two years and three months

i88 MRS. DALLOWAY

ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa
Dalloway; she pitied them.

She pitied and despised them from the bottom of
her heart, as she stood on the soft carpet, looking at
the old engraving of a little girl with a muff. With
all this luxury going on, what hope was there for a
better state of things? Instead of lying on a sofa —
“My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said — she
should have been in a factory; behind a counter;
Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!

Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into
a church two years three months ago. She had
heard the Rev. Edward Whittaker preach; the boys
sing; had seen the solemn lights descend, and
whether it was the music, or the voices (she herself
when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin;
but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear),
the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and
surged in her had been assuaged as she sat there,
and she had wept copiously, and gone to call on
Mr. Whittaker at his private house in Kensington.
It was the hand of God, he said. The Lord had
shown her the way. So now, whenever the hot and
painful feelings boiled within her, this hatred of
Mrs. Dalloway, this grudge against the world, she
thought of God. She thought of Mr. Whittaker.

MRS. DALLOWAY 189

Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled
her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable
upon the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with
steady and sinister serenity at Mrs. Dalloway, who
came out with her daughter.

Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves.
That was because Miss Kjfinan and her mother
hated each other. She couli; not bear to see them
together. She ran upstairs t > find her gloves.

But Miss Kilman did no' hate Mrs. Dalloway.
Turning her large goosebei ry-coloured eyes upon
Clarissa, observing her smal pink face, her delicate
body, her air of freshness an I fashion, Miss Kilman
felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known
neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your
life away! And there rose in her an overmastering
desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could
have felled her it would have eased her. But it
was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery
that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery.
If only she could make her weep; could ruin her;
humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You
are right! But this was God’s will, not Miss Kal-
man’s. It was to be a religious victory. So she
glared; so she glowered.

Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian—

MRS. DALLOWAY

190

this woman 1 This woman had taken her daughter
from her! She in touch with invisible presences!
Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or
grace, she know the meaning of life!

“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs.
Dalloway said.

Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there.
Miss Kilman was not going to make herself agree-
able. She had always earned her living. Her knowl-
edge of modern history was thorough in the extreme.
She did out of her meagre income set aside so much
ior causes she believed in; whereas this woman did
nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter
— but here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the
beautiful girl. ,/\

- So they were going to the Stores. '''Oddjit was, as
Miss Kilman stood there (and stand l£ne did, with
the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric mon-
ster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second
by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred
(which was for ideas, not people) crumbled, how she
lost her malignity, her size, became second by sec-
ond merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom
Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help.

At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed.
Saying good-bye, she laughed.

MRS. DALLOWAY 191

\

Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Eliza-
beth, downstairs.

With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish,
for this woman was taking her daughter from her,
Clarissa leant over the bannisters and cried out,
“Remember the party! Remember our party to-
night!”

But Elizabeth had already opened the front door;
there was a van passing; she did not answer.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back
into the drawing-room, tinghng all over. How de-
testable, how detestable they are! For now that
the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it
overwhelmed her — the idea. The cruelest things in
the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot,
domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous,

• finitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a
ackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion.
Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did
she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?
And she watched out of the window the old lady
opposite climbing upstairs. Let her climb upstairs
if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as
Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part
her curtains, and disappear again into the back-
ground. Somehow one respected that — that old

192

MRS. DALLOWAY

woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious
that she was being watched. There was something
solemn in it — but love and religion would destroy
that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The
odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight
that made her want to cry.

Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine,
everything that was true went. Take Peter Walsh
now. There was a man, charming, clever, with
ideas about everything. If you wanted to know
about Pope, say, or Addison, or just to talk non-
sense, what people were like, what things meant,
Peter knew better than any one. It was Peter who
had helped her; Peter who had lent her books. But
look at the women he loved — vulgar, trivial, com-
monplace. Think of Peter in love — he came to see
her after all these years, and what did he talk about?
Himself. Horrible passion! she thought. Degrad-
ing passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and
her Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching,
to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever
so many years) move away from the window, as if
she were attached to that sound, that string.
Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her.

MRS. DALLOWAY

193

Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the
finger fell making the moment solemn. She was
forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move,
to go — but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as
she turned and disappeared, and could still just see
her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom.
She was still there moving about at the other end of
the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackin-
toshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle,
that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom
she could see going from chest of drawers to dress-
ing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme
mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or
Peter might say he had sohed, but Clarissa didn’t
believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of
solving, was simply this: here was one room; there
another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Love — but here the other clock, the clock which
always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came
shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which
it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well
with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so
just, but she must remember all sorts of little things
besides — Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses
for ices — all sorts of little things came flooding and
lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn

194 MRS. DALLOWAY

stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea.
Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices.
She must telephone now at once.

Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, com-
ing in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of
trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of car-
riages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of
myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the
domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last
relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to
break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon
the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street
for a moment to mutter “It is the flesh.”

It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa
Dalloway had insulted her. That she expected.
But she had not triumphed; she had not mastered
the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had
laughed at her for being that; and had revived the
fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did
beside Clarissa. Nor could she talk as she did. But
why wish to resemble her? Why? She despised
Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her heart. She
was not serious. She was not good. Her life was
a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had
been overcome. She had, as a matter of fact, very
nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway

MRS. DALLOWAY

195

laughed at her. “It is the flesh, it is the flesh,” she
muttered (it being her habit to talk aloud) trying
to subdue this turbulent and painful feeling as she
walked down Victoria Street. She prayed to God.
She could not help being ugly; she could not afford
to buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had
laughed — but she would concentrate her mind upon
something else until she had reached the pillar-box.
At any rate she had got Elizabeth. But she would
think of something else; she would think of Russia;
until she reached the pillar-box.

How nice it must be, she said, in the country,
struggling, as Mr. Whittaker had told her, with that
violent grudge against the world which had scorned
her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with this
indignity — the infliction of her unlovable body which
people could not bear to see. Do her hair as she
might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald,
white. No clothes suited her. She might buy any-
thing. And for a woman, of course, that meant
never meeting the opposite sex. Never would she
come first with any one. Sometimes lately it had
seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food
was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner,
her tea; her hot-water bottle at night. But on*
must fight; vanquish; have faith in God. Mr. Whit-

MRS. DALLOWAY

196

taker had said she was there for a purpose. But no
one knew the agony I He said, pointing to the cruci-
fix, that God knew. But why should she have to
suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway,
escaped? Knowledge comes through suffering, said
Mr. Whittaker.

She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had
turned into the cool brown tobacco department of
the Army and Navy Stores while she was still mut-
tering to herself what Mr. Whittaker had said about
knowledge coming through suffering and the flesh.
“The flesh,” she muttered.

What department did she want? Elizabeth inter-
rupted her.

“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked
straight on to the lift.

Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and
that; guided her in her abstraction as if she had
been a great child, an unwieldy battleship. There
were the petticoats, brown, decorous, striped, frivo-
lous, solid, flimsy; and she chose, in her abstrac-
tion, portentously, and the girl serving thought her
mad.

Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the
parcel, what Miss Kilman was thinking. They must

MRS. DALLOWAY

m

have their tea, said Miss Kilman, rousing, collecting
herself. They had their tea.

Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kalman
could be hungry. It was her way of eating, eating
with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a
plate of sugared cakes on th< table next them; then,
when a lady and a child sat down and the child took
the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes,
Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted that
cake — the pink one. The pleasure of eating was
almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to
be baffled even in that I

When people are happy, they have a reserve, she
had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas
she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond
of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble, so she
would say staying on after the lesson standing by
the fire-place with her bag of books, her “satchel,”
she called it, on a Tuesday morning, after the
lesson was over. And she talked too about the war.
After all, there were people who did not think the
English invariably right. There were books. There
were meetings. There were other points of view.
Would Elizabeth like to come with her to listen to
So-and-so (a most extraordinary looking old man) ?

198 MRS. DALLOWAY

Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in
Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman.
She had lent her books. Law, medicine, politic^,
all professions are open to women of your genera-
tion, said Miss Kilman. But for herself, her career
was absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good
gracious, said Elizabeth, no.

And her mother would come calling to say that
a hamper had come from Bourton and would Miss
Kilman like some flowers? To Miss Kilman she
was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman
squashed the flowers all in a bunch, and hadn’t any
small talk, and what interested Miss Kilman bored
her mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible
together; and Miss Kilman swelled and looked very
plain. But then Miss Kilman was frightfully clever.
Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They
lived with everything they wanted, — her mother had
breakfast in bed every day; Lucy carried it up; and
she liked old women because they were Duchesses,
and being descended from some Lord. But Miss
Kilman said (one of those Tuesday mornings when
the lesson was over), “My grandfather kept an oil
and colour shop in Kensington.” Miss Kilman
made one feel so small.

Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth,

MRS. DALLOWAY

*99

with her oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery,
sat perfectly upright; no, she did not want anything
more. She looked for her gloves — her white gloves.
They were under the table. Ah, but she must not
go! Miss Kilman could not let her go! this youth,
that was so beautiful, this girl, whom she genuinely
loved! Her large hand opened and shut on the
table.

But perhaps it was a little flat somehow, Eliza-
beth felt. And really she would like to go.

But said Miss Kilman, ‘ I’ve not quite finished
yet.”

Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it
was rather stuffy in here.

“Are you going to the party to-night?” Miss Kil-
man said. Elizabeth supposed she was going; her
mother wanted her to go. She must not let parties
absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering the last two
inches of a chocolate eclair.

She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said.
Miss Kilman opened her mouth, slightly projected
her chin, and swallowed down the last inches of the
chocolate eclair, then wiped her fingers, and washed
the tea round in her cup.

She was about to split asunder, she felt. The
agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she

200 MRS. DALLOWAY

could clasp her, if she could make her hers abso*
lutely and forever and then die; that was all she
wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of any-
thing to say; to see Elizabeth turning against her;
to be felt repulsive even by her — it was too much;
she could not stand it. The thick fingers curled
inwards.

“I never go to parties,” said Miss Kilman, just
to keep Elizabeth from going. “People don’t ask
me to parties” — and she knew as she said it that it
\vas this egotism that was her undoing; Mr. Whit-
taker had warned her; but she could not help it.
She had suffered so horribly. “Why should they
ask me?” she said. “I’m plain, I’m unhappy.” She
knew it was idiotic. But it was all those people pass-
ing — people with parcels who despised her, who
made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman.
She had her degree. She was a woman who had
made her way in the world. Her knowledge of
modern history was more than respectable.

“I don’t pity myself,” she said. “I pity” — she
meant to say “your mother” but no, she could not,
not to Elizabeth. “I pity other people,” she said,
“more.”

Like some dumb creature who has been brought
up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands

MRS. DALLOWAY aoi

there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth Dalloway
sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything
more?

“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her
voice quivered. Right away to the end of the field
the dumb creature galloped in terror.

The great hand opened and shut.

Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came.
One had to pay at the desk, Elizabeth said, and
went off, drawing out, so Mis Kilman felt, the very
entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed
the room, and then, with a final twist, bowing her
head very politely, she went.

She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble
table among the eclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice
by shocks of suffering. She had gone. Mrs. Dallo-
way had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone. Beauty
had gone, youth had gone.

So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the
little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and
somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she
lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially
prepared for taking to India; next got among the
accouchement sets, and baby linen; through all the
commodities of the world, perishable and permanent,
hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling*

202

MRS. DALLOWAY

now sweet, now sour she lurched; saw herself thus
lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face,
full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out
into the street.

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front
of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the
traffic, there was the habitation of God. Doggedly
she set off with her parcel to that other sanctuary,
the Abbey, where, raising her hands in a tent before
her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter too;
the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of
social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands
before their faces; but once they removed them, in-
stantly reverent, middle class, English men and
women, some of them desirous of seeing the wax
works.

But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face.
Now she was deserted; now rejoined. New wor-
shippers came in from the street to replace the
strollers, and still, as people gazed round and
shuffled past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior,
still she barred her eyes with her fingers and tried
in this double darkness, for the light in the Abbey
was bodiless, to aspire above the vanities, the de-
sires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred
and of love. Her hands twitched. She seemed to

MRS. DALLOWAY

202

struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and
the path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of
the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous
K.C., approached Him simply, and having done their
praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ
pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of
the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the
threshold of their underworld, thought of her sym-
pathetically as a soul haunting the same territory;
a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman,
a soul.

But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her,
and being himself neat as a new pin, could not help
being a little distressed by the poor lady’s disorder;
her hair down; her parcel on the floor. She did not
at once let him pass. But, as he stood gazing about
him, at the white marbles, grey window panes, and
accumulated treasures (for he was extremely proud
of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and power
as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time
(it was so rough the approach to her God — so tough
her desires) impressed him, as they had impressed
Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the thought of
her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Ed-
ward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.

And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an

MRS. DALLOWAY

204

omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She
thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It
was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get
on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood
there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning.
. . . People were beginning to compare her to pop-
lar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running
water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a
burden to her, for she so much preferred being left
alone to do what she liked in the country, but they
would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to
parties, and London was so dreary compared with
being alone in the country with her father and the
dogs.

Buses swooped, settled, were off — garish caravans,
glistening with red and yellow varnish. But which
should she get on to? She had no preferences. Of
course, she would not push her way. She inclined
to be passive. It was expression she needed, but
her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and, as her
mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding
herself so straight, she was always charming to look
at; and lately, in the evening especially, when she
was interested, for she never seemed excited, die
looked almost beautiful, very stately, very serene.
What could she be thinking? Every man fell in

MRS. DALLOWAY

*05

love with her, and she was really awfully bored.
For it was beginning. Her mother could see that —
the compliments were beginning. That she did not
care more about it — for instance for her clothes —
sometimes worried Clarissa, but perhaps it was as
well with all those puppies and guinea pigs about
having distemper, and it gave her a charm. And
now there was this odd fri ndship with Miss Kil-
man. Well, thought Clarissa about three o’clock in
the morning, reading Baron Marbot for she could
not sleep, it proves she has a heart.

Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most
competently boarded the omnibus, in front of every-
body. She took a seat on top. The impetuous crea-
ture — a pirate — started forward, sprang away; she
had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it
was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruth-
lessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching
a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-
like and arrogant in between, and then rushing inso-
lently all sails spread up Whitehall. And did Eliza-
beth give one thought to poor Miss Kilman who
loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been a
fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was de-
lighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious.
It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores.

MRS. DALLOWAY

ao6

And now it was like riding, to be rushing up White-
hall; and to each movement of the omnibus the
beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded
freely like a rider, like the figure-head of a ship, for
the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her
cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her
fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead,
blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence
of sculpture.

It was always talking about her own sufferings
that made Miss Kilman so difficult. And was she
right? If it was being on committees and giving
ap hours and hours every day (she hardly ever saw
him in London) that helped the poor, her father
did that, goodness knows, — if that was what Miss
Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it was
so difficult to say. Oh, she would like to go a little
further. Another penny was it to the Strand? Here
was another penny then. She would go up the
Strand.

She liked people who were ill. And every pro-
fession is open to the women of your generation, said
Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She might
be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might
own a thousand acres and have people under her.
She would eo and see them in their cottages. This

MRS. DALLOWAY

207

was Somerset House. One might be a very good
farmer — and that, strangely enough though Miss
Kilman had her share in it, was almost entirely due
to Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so seri-
ous, that great grey building. And she liked the
feeling of people working. She liked those churches,
like shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of
the Strand. It was quite different here from West-
minster, she thought, getting off at Chancery Lane.
It was so serious; it was so busy. In short, she
would like to have a profession. She would become
a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if
she found it necessary, all because of the Strand.

The feet of those people busy about their activi-
ties, hands putting stone to stone, minds eternally
occupied not with trivial chatterings (comparing
women to poplars — which was rather exciting, of
course, but very silly), but with thoughts of ships,
of business, of law, of administration, and with it
all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay (there
was the river), pious (there was the Church), made
her quite determined, whatever her mother might
say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she
was, of course, rather lazy.

And it was much better to say nothing about it
It seemed so silly. It was the sort of thing that did

ao8

MRS. DALLOWAY

sometimes happen, when one was alone — buildings
without architects’ names, crowds of people coming
back from the city having more power than single
clergymen in Kensington, than any of the books
Miss Kilman had lent her, to stimulate what lay
slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy
floor to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches
its arms; it was just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch
of the arms, an impulse, a revelation, which has its
effects for ever, and then down again it went to the
sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress
for dinner. But what was the time? — where was a
clock?

She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a
little way towards St. Paul’s, shyly, like some one
penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house by
night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should
suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her
business, nor did she dare wander off into queer
alleys, tempting bye-streets, any more than in a
strange house open doors which might be bedroom
doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the
larder. For no Dalloways came down the Strand
daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trust-
ing.

In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely

MRS. DALLOWAY

209

Immature, like a child still, attached to dolls, to old
slippers; a perfect baby; and that was charming.
But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway fam-
ily the tradition of public service. Abbesses, prin-
cipals, head mistresses, dignitaries, in the republic
of women — without being brilliant, any of them,
they were that. She penetrated a little further in
the direction of St. Paul’s. She liked the geniality,
sisterhood, motherhood, br< -therhood of this up-
roar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tre-
mendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the
unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar;
military music; as if people were marching; yet had
they been dying — had some woman breathed her
last and whoever was watching, opening the window
of the room where she had just brought off that act
of supreme dignity, looked down on Fleet Street,
that uproar, that military music would have come
triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.

It was not conscious. There was no recognition
in it of one fortune, or fate, and for that very reason
even to those dazed with watching for the last
shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying,
consoling. Forgetfulness in people might wound,
their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring end-
lessly, year in year out, would take whatever it

210

MRS. DALLOWAY

might be; this vow; this van; this life; this proces-
sion, would wrap them all about and carry them on,
as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a
splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and
rolls them on.

But it was later than she thought. Her mother
would not like her to be wandering off alone like
this. She turned back down the Strand.

A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was
quite a wind) blew a thin black veil over the sun
and over the Strand. The faces faded; the omni-
buses suddenly lost their glow. For although the
clouds were of mountainous white so that one could
fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with
broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure
gardens, on their flanks, and had all the appear-
ance of settled habitations assembled for the con-
ference of gods above the world, there was a per-
petual movement among them. Signs were inter-
changed, when, as if to fulfil some scheme arranged
already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole block
of pyramidal size which had kept its station inalter-
ably advanced into the midst or gravely led the pro-
cession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they
seemed at their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity,
nothing could be fresher, freer, more sensitive super-

MRS. DALLOWAY

211

ficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled surface;
to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage
was immediately possible; and in spite of the grave
fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now
they struck light to the earth, now darkness.

Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway
mounted the Westminster omnibus.

Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the
light and shadow which now made the wall grey,
now the bananas bright yellow , now made the Strand
grey, now made the omnibuse bright yellow, seemed
to Septimus Warren Smith 1> ing on the sofa in the
sitting-room; watching the watery gold glow and
fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live
creature on the roses, on the wall-paper. Outside
the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the
depths of the air; the sound of water was in the
room and through the waves came the voices of
birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on
his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the
sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bath-
ing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away
on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far
away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body;
fear no more.

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature sig*

ai2 MRS. DALLOWAY

nified by some laughing hint like that gold spot
which went round the wall — there, there, there — her
determination to show, by brandishing her plumes,
shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and
that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing
close up to breathe through her hollowed hands
Shakespeare’s words, her meaning.

Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her
hands, watched him; saw him smiling. He was
happy then. But she could not bear to see him
smiling. It was not marriage; it was not being
one’s husband to look strange like that, always to
be starting, laughing, sitting hour after hour silent,
or clutching her and telling her to write. The table
drawer was full of those writings; about war; about
Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is
no death. Lately he had become excited suddenly
for no reason (and both Dr. Holmes and Sir William
Bradshaw said excitement was the worst thing for
him), and waved his hands and cried out that he
knew the truth! He knew everything! That man,
his friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said.
He was singing behind the screen. She wrote it
down just as he spoke it. Some things were very
beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was
always stopping in the middle, changing his mind;

MRS. DALLOWAY

213

wanting to add something; hearing something new;
listening with his hand up.

But she heard nothing.

And once they found the girl who did the room
reading one of these papers in fits of laughter. It
was a dreadful pity. For that made Septimus cry
out about human cruelty — how they tear each other
to pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces.
“Holmes is on us,” he would say, and he would
invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating por-
ridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare — making him-
self roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes
seemed to stand for something horrible to him.
“Human nature,” he called him. Then there were
the visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and
lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him.
He would look over the edge of the sofa down
into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it
was only a barrel organ or some man crying in the
street. But “Lovely!” he used to cry, and the tears
would run down his cheeks, which was to her the
most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Sep-
timus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And
he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry
that he was falling down, down into the flames!
Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid.

MRS. DALLOWAY

314

But there was nothing. They were alone in the
room. It was a dream, she would tell him and so
quiet him at last, but sometimes she was frightened
too. She sighed as she sat sewing.

Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind
outside a wood in the evening. Now she put down
her scissors; now she turned to take something from
the table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little
tapping built up something on the table there, where
she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes he could see
her blurred outline; her little black body; her face
and hands; her turning movements at the table, as
she took up a reel, or looked (she was apt to lose
things) for her silk. She was making a hat for Mrs.
Filmer’s married daughter, whose name was — he
had forgotten her name.

“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married
daughter?” he asked.

“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it
was too small, she said, holding it before her. Mrs.
Peters was a big woman; but she did not like her.
It was only because Mrs. Filmer had been so good
to them. “She gave me grapes this morning,” she
said — that Rezia wanted to do something to show
that they were grateful. She had come into the

MRS. DALLOWAY

2 IS

room the other evening and found Mrs. Peters, who
thought they were out, playing the gramophone.

“Was it true?” he asked. She was playing the
gramophone? Yes; she had told him about it at
the time; she had found Mrs. Peters playing the
gramophone.

He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to
see whether a gramophone was really there. But
real things — real things were too exciting. He must
be cautious. He would not go mad. First he looked
at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then, grad-
ually at the gramophone with the green trumpet.
Nothing could be more exact. And so, gathering
courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of
bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece, with the jar of
roses. None of these things moved. All were still;
all were real.

“She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said
Rezia.

“What does Mr. Peters do?” Septimus asked.

“Ah,” said Rezia, trying to remember. She
thought Mrs. Filmer had said that he travelled for
some company. “Just now he is in Hull,” she said.

“Just now!” She said that with her Italian ac-

MRS. DALLOWAY

*16

cent. She said that herself. He shaded his eyes so
that he might see only a little of her face at a time,
first the chin, then the nose, then the forehead, in
case it were deformed, or had some terrible mark
on it. But no, there she was, perfectly natural, sew-
ing, with the pursed lips that women have, the set,
the melancholy expression, when sewing. But there
was nothing terrible about it, he assured himself,
looking a second time, a third time at her face, her
hands, for what was frightening or disgusting in her
as she sat there in broad daylight, sewing? Mrs.
Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in
Hull. Why then rage and prophesy? Why fly
scourged and outcast? Why be made to tremble
and sob by the clouds? Why seek truths and de-
fiver messages when Rezia sat sticking pins into the
front of her dress, and Mr. Peters was in Hull?
Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling
through the sea, down, down into the flames, all
were burnt out, for he had a sense, as he watched
Rezia trimming the straw hat for Mrs. Peters, of
a coverlet of flowers.

‘‘It’s too small for Mrs. Peters,” said Septimus.

For the first time for days he was speaking as he
used to dol Of course it was — absurdly small, she
said. But Mrs. Peters had chosen it.

MRS. DALLOWAY

217

He took it out of her hands. He said it was an
organ grinder’s monkey’s hat.

How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had
they laughed like this together, poking fun privately
like married people. What she meant was that if
Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or any-
body they would not have un* lerstood what she and
Septimus were laughing at.

“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of
the hat. Never had she felt so happy! Never in
her life!

But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus
said. Now the poor woman looked like a pig at
a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as Septimus
did.)

What had she got in her work-box? She had rib-
bons and beads, tassels, artificial flowers. She
tumbled them out on the table. He began putting
odd colours together — for though he had no fingers,
could not even do up a parcel, he had a wonderful
eye, and often he was right, sometimes absurd, of
course, but sometimes wonderfully right.

“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured,
taking up this and that, Rezia kneeling by his side,
looking over his shoulder. Now it was finished —
that is to say the design; she must stitch it to*

218 MRS. DALLOWAY

gether. But she must be very, very careful, he said,
to keep it just as he had made it.

So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she
made a sound like a kettle on the hob; bubbling,
murmuring, always busy, her strong little pointed
fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing
straight. The sun might go in and out, on the
tassels, on the wall-paper, but he would wait, he
thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his
ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait
in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which
one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in
the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground,
or some arrangement of the trees (one must be
scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and
•the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.

“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’
hat on the tips of her fingers. “That’ll do for the
moment. Later . . .” her sentence bubbled away
drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.

It was wonderful. Never had he done anything
which made him feel so proud. It was so real, it
was so substantial, Mrs. Peters’ hat.

“Just look at it,” he said.

Yes, it would always make her happy to see that
hat. He had become himself then, he had laughed

MRS. DALLOWAY

219

then. They had been alone together. Always she
would like that hat.

He told her to try it on.

“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running
over to the glass and looking first this side then that.
Then she snatched it off again, for there was a tap
at the door. Could it be Sir William Bradshaw?
Had he sent already?

No! it was only the small girl with the evening
paper.

What always happened, then happened — what
happened every night of th« ir lives. The small
girl sucked her thumb at the door; Rezia went down
on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got a
bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For so it
always happened. First one thing, then another.
So she built it up, first one thing and then another.
Dancing, skipping, round and round the room they
went. He took the paper. Surrey was all out, he
read. There was a heat wave. Rezia repeated:
Surrey was all out. There was a heat wave, making
it part of the game she was playing with Mrs.
Filmer’s grandchild, both of them laughing, chatter-
ing at the same time, at their game. He was very
tired. He was very happy. He would sleep. He
shut his eyes. But directly he saw nothing the

220

MRS. DALLOWAY

sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and
sounded like the cries of people seeking and not
finding, and passing further and further away.
They had lost him!

He started up in terror. What did he see? The
plate of bananas on the sideboard. Nobody was
there (Rezia had taken the child to its mother. It
was bedtime). That was it: to be alone forever.
That was the doom pronounced in Milan when he
came into the room and saw them cutting out buck-
ram shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever.

He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas.
He was alone, exposed on this bleak eminence,
stretched out — but not on a hill-top; not on a crag;
on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the
‘visions, the faces, the voices of the dead, where
were they? There was a screen in front of him,
with black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he
had once seen mountains, where he had seen faces,
where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.

“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A
mouse had squeaked, or a curtain rustled. Those
were the voices of the dead. The screen, the coal-
scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him then
face the screen, the coal-scuttle and the sideboard
. . . but Rezia burst into the room chattering.

MRS. DALLOWAY

221

Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were
changed. Mrs. Filmer would not be able to go to
Brighton after all. There was no time to let Mrs.
Williams know, and really Rezia thought it very,
very annoying, when she caught sight of the hat
and thought . . . perhaps . . . she . . . might just
make a little. . . . Her voice died out in contented
melody.

“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs,
her swearing), the needle had broken. Hat, child,
Brighton, needle. She built i: up; first one thing,
then another, she built it up, sewing.

She wanted him to say whether by moving the
rose she had improved the hat. She sat on the end
of the sofa.

They were perfectly happy now, she said, sud-
denly, putting the hat down. For she could say any-
thing to him now. She could say whatever came
into her head. That was almost the first thing she
had felt about him, that night in the cafe when he
had come in with his English friends. He had come
in, rather shyly, looking round him, and his hat had
fallen when he hung it up. That she could remem-
ber. She knew he was English, though not one of
the large Englishmen her sister admired, for he was
always thin; but he had a beautiful fresh colour;

as*

MRS. DALLOWAY

and with his big nose, his bright eyes, his way of
sitting a little hunched made her think, she had
often told him, of a young hawk, that first evening
she saw him, when they were playing dominoes, and
he had come in — of a young hawk; but with her he
was always very gentle. She had never seen him
wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes through this
terrible war, but even so, when she came in, he
would put it all away. Anything, anything in the
whole world, any little bother with her work, any-
thing that struck her to say she would tell him, and
he understood at once. Her own family even were
not the same. Being older than she was and being
so clever — how serious he was, wanting her to read
Shakespeare before she could even read a child’s
■Story in English! — being so much more experienced,
he could help her. And she too could help him.

But this hat now. And then (it was getting late)
Sir William Bradshaw.

She held her hands to her head, waiting for him
to say did he like the hat or not, and as she sat
there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind,
like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and
always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her
mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses
that came to her naturally and, if he should say

MRS. DALLOWAY

223

anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting
with all its claws firm upon the bough.

But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people
we are most fond of are not good for us when we
are ill.” Bradshaw said, he must be taught to rest.
Bradshaw said they must be .separated.

“Must,” “must,” why “must ’? What power had
Bradshaw over him? “What right has Bradshaw
to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.

“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said
Rezia. (Mercifully, she could now say anything to
Septimus.)

So he was in their power ! I [olmes and Bradshaw
were on him! The brute with the red nostrils was
snuffing into every secret place! “Must” it could
say! Where were his papers? the things he had
written?

She brought him his papers, the things he had
written, things she had written for him. She
tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at
them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and
women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings —
were they? — on their backs; circles traced round
shillings and sixpences — the suns and stars; zigzag-
ging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped
together, exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces

234

MRS. DALLOWAY

with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps
be waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he
cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing be-
hind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conver-
sations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans —
his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees;
tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the mean-
ing of the world. Burn them! he cried.

But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were
very beautiful, she thought. She would tie them
up (for she had no envelope) with a piece of silk.

Even if they took him, she said, she would go
with him. They could not separate them against
their wills, she said.

Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers,
^and tied the parcel almost without looking, sitting
beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were
about her. She was a flowering tree; and through
her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who
had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one;
not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph,
the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount
the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and
Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven
stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men who
made ten thousand a year and talked of propor-

MRS. DALLOWAY

23 $

tion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes
said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they
were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw
nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they
said. Over them she triumphed.

“There! ” she said. The papers were tied up. No
one should get at them. She w ould put them away.

And, she said, nothing should separate them. She
sat down beside him and called him by the name of
that hawk or crow which being malicious and a great
destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No one
could separate them, she said.

Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack
their things, but hearing voices downstairs and
thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps called, ran
down to prevent him coming up.

Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on
the staircase.

“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,”
Holmes was saying.

“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,”
she said.

He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings
spread barring his passage. But Holmes persevered.

“My dear lady, allow me . . Holmes said, put-
ting her aside (Holmes was a powerfully built man).

226

MRS. DALLOWAY

Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would
burst open the door. Holmes would say “In a funk,
eh?” Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes;
not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hop-
ping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs.
Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with “Bread” carved
on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The
gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was
coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who
always did that sort of thing, had packed them.
There remained only the window, the large Blooms-
bury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the trou-
blesome, and rather melodramatic business of open-
ing the window and throwing himself out. It was
their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she
was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that
sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would
wait till the very last moment. He did not want to
die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human be-
ings — what did they want? Coming down the stair-
case opposite an old man stopped and stared at
him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!”
he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently
down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.

“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the
door open. Rezia ran to the window, she saw; she

MRS. DALLOWAY 227

understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer collided
with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron
and made her hide her eyes in the bedroom. There
was a great deal of running up and down stairs.
Dr. Holmes came in — white as a sheet, shaking all
over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave
and drink something, he said (What was it? Some-
thing sweet), for her husband was horribly mangled,
would not recover consciousness, she must not see
him, must be spared as much -is possible, would have
the inquest to go through, poor young woman. Who
could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one
was in the least to blame (lie told Mrs. Filmer).
And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not
conceive.

It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that
she was opening long windows, stepping out into
some garden. But where? The clock was striking
— one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; com-
pared with all this thumping and whispering; like
Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the
clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs.
Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the
body in here, would they?) seemed part of that
garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly
rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her

228 MRS. DALLOWAY

aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus
saluted, and Septimus had been through the War.
Of her memories, most were happy.

She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields —
where could it have been? — on to some hill, some-
where near the sea, for there were ships, gulls,
butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too, there
they sat, and, half dreaming, came to her through
the bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings, stir-
rings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it
seemed to her, hollowing them in its arched shell
and murmuring to her laid on shore, strewn she felt,
like flying flowers over some tomb.

“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old
woman who guarded her with her honest light-blue
byes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t bring him
in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-
poohed. Oh no, oh no! They were carrying him
away now. Ought she not to be told? Married
people ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought.
But they must do as the doctor said.

“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her
pulse. She saw the large outline of his body stand-
ing dark against the window. So that was Dr.
Holmes.

MRS. DALLOWAY

229

One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh
thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilisation,
as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded.
Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital,
having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor
devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by
disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago
at one of these crossings, as might happen to one-
self. That was civilisation. It struck him coming
back from the East — the efficiency, the organisation,
the communal spirit of London. Every cart or car-
riage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambu-
lance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not
touching rather, the respect which they showed this
ambulance with its victim inside — busy men hurry-
ing home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed
of some wife; or presumably how easily it might
have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a
doctor and a nurse. . . . Ah, but thinking became
morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring
up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure,
a sort of lust too over the visual impression warned
one not to go on with that sort of thing any more — •
fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet,
thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the
corner though the light high bell could be heard

MRS. DALLOWAY

230

down the next street and still farther as it crossed
the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it
is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do
as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. It
had been his undoing — this susceptibility — in Anglo-
Indian society; not weeping at the right time, or
laughing either. I have that in me, he thought
standing by the pillar-box, which could now dis-
solve in tears. Why, Heaven knows. Beauty of
some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which
beginning with that visit to Clarissa had exhausted
him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip,
of one impression after another down into that cellar
where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever
know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete
and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown
garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes;
really it took one’s breath away, these moments;
there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the
British Museum one of them, a moment, in which
things came together; this ambulance; and life and
death. It was as if he were sucked up to some very
high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of
him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare.
It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society— >
this susceptibility.

MRS. DALLOWAY

231

Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with
him somewhere, Clarissa superficially at least, so
easily moved, now in despair, now in the best of
spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good com-
pany, spotting queer little scenes, names, people
from the top of a bus, for they used to explore
London and bring back bags full of treasures from
the Caledonian market — Clarissa had a theory in
those days — they had heaps of theories, always
theories, as young people have. It was to explain
the feeling they had of dissati faction; not knowing
people; not being known. For how could they
know each other? You met every day; then not for
six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they
agreed, how little one knew people. But she said,
sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she
felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here’’; and
she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere.
She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue.
She was all that. So that to know her, or any one,
one must seek out the people who completed them;
even the places. Odd affinities she had with people
she had never spoken to, some woman in the street,
some man behind a counter — even trees, or barns.
It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her
horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that

MRS. DALLOWAY

232

she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our
apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so
momentary compared with the other, the unseen
part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might
survive, be recovered somehow attached to this per-
son or that, or even haunting certain places after
death . . . perhaps — perhaps.

Looking back over that long friendship of almost
thirty years her theory worked to this extent.
Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meet-
ings had been what with his absences and interrup-
tions (this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth,
like a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just as he
was beginning to talk to Clarissa) the effect of them
on his life was immeasurable. There was a mys-
tery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, un-
comfortable grain — the actual meeting; horribly
painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most
unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its
scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the
whole feel of it and understanding, after years of
lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board
ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest
things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose 1
thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas).
She had influenced him more than any person he

MRS. DALLOWAY

233

had ever known. And always in this way coming
before him without his wishing it, cool, lady-like,
critical; or ravishing, romantic, recalling some field
or English harvest. He saw her most often in the
country, not in London. One scene after another
at Bourton. . . .

He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall,
with its mounds of reddish (.hairs and sofas, its
spike-leaved, withered-looking plants. He got his
key off the hook. The young lady handed him
some letters. He went upstairs — he saw her most
often at Bourton, in the late summer, when he
stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people
did in those days. First on top of some hill there
she would stand, hands clapjjed to her hair, her
cloak blowing out, pointing, crying to them — she
saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making
the kettle boil — very ineffective with her fingers;
the smoke curtseying, blowing in their faces; her
little pink face showing through; begging watei
from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the
door to watch them go. They walked always; the
others drove. She was bored driving, disliked all
animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along
roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot
him back across country; and all the time the?

MRS. DALLOWAY

*34

argued, discussed poetry, discussed people, dis-
cussed politics (she was a Radical then); never
noticing a thing except when she stopped, cried out
at a view or a tree, and made him look with her;
and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking
ahead, with a flower for her aunt, never tired of
walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on
Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breit-
kopf would open the piano and sing without any
voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-chairs, try-
ing not to laugh, but always breaking down and
laughing, laughing — laughing at nothing. Breit-
kopf was supposed not to see. And then in the
morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in
front of the house. . . .

Oh it was a letter from her 1 This blue envelope;
that was her hand. And he would have to read it.
Here was another of those meetings, bound to be
painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an
effort. “How heavenly it was to see him. She
must tell him that.” That was all.

But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished
she hadn’t written it. Coming on top of his
thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why
couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had married

MRS. DALLOWAY 235

Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness
all these years.

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from
it. Any number of people had hung up their hats
on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of
it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the
cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t
cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing
that had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds
at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids
to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were
a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean
platter. For sleep, one bed; for sitting in, one arm-
chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s
chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, let-
ters, dressing-gown, slipped about on the imper-
sonality of the horsehair like incongruous imperti-
nences. And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him
see all this. “Heavenly to see you. She must say
so!” He folded the paper; pushed it away; noth-
ing would induce him to read it again!

To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must
have sat down and written it directly he left her;
stamped it; sent somebody to the post. It was, as
people say, very like her. She was upset by his

436

MRS. DALLOWAY

visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a moment,
when she kissed his hand, regretted, envied him
even, remembered possibly (for he saw her look it)
something he had said — how they would change the
world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it was
this; it was middle age; it was mediocrity; then
forced herself with her indomitable vitality to put
all that aside, there being in her a thread of life
which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome
obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he
had never known the like of. Yes; but there would
come a reaction directly he left the room. She
would be frightfully sorry for him; she would think
what in the world she could do to give him pleasure
(short always of the one thing) and he could see
her with the tears running down her cheeks going
to her writing-table and dashing off that one line
which he was to find greeting him. . . . “Heavenly
to see you!” And she meant it.

Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.

But it would not have been a success, their mar-
riage. The other thing, after all, came so much
more naturally.

It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it.
Peter Walsh, who had done just respectably, filled
the usual posts adequately, was liked, but thought

MRS. DALLOWAY

*37

ft little cranky, gave himself airs — it was odd that hi
should have had, especially now that his hair was
grey, a contented look; a look of having reserves.
It was this that made him attractive to women who
liked the sense that he was not altogether manly.
There was something unusual about him, or some-
thing behind him. It might be that he was book-
ish — never came to see you without taking up the
book on the table (he was now reading, with his
bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he was a
gentleman, which showed itself in the way he
knocked the ashes out of h s pipe, and in his man-
ners of course to women. For it was very charm-
ing and quite ridiculous how easily some girl with-
out a grain of sense could twist him round her
finger. But at her own risk. That is to say, though
he might be ever so easy, and indeed with his gaiety
and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was
only up to a point. She said something — no, no;
he saw through that. He wouldn’t stand that — no,
no. Then he could shout and rock and hold his
sides together over some joke with men. He was
the best judge of cooking in India. He was a man.
But not the sort of man one had to respect — which
was a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance;
not in the least like that, Daisy thought, when, In

*38 MRS. DALLOWAY

spite of her two small children, she used to com*
pare them.

He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets.
Out came with his pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy
on the verandah; Daisy all in white, with a fox-
terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark;
the best he had ever seen of her. It did come, after
all so naturally; so much more naturally than
Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and
fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably
pretty girl on the verandah exclaimed (he could
hear her). Of course, of course she would give him
everything! she cried (she had no sense of discre-
tion) everything he wanted! she cried, running to
meet him, whoever might be looking. And she was
only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well,
well!

Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at
his age. And it came over him when he woke in
the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry?
For him it would be all very well, but what about
her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and no chatter-
box, in whom he had confided, thought this absence
If his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers might
serve to make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant.
It was a question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said;

MRS. DALLOWAY

239

the social barrier; giving up her children. She’d be
a widow with a past one of these days, draggling
about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate
(you know, she said, what such women get like,
with too much paint). But Peter Walsh pooh-
poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Any-
how she must settle for herself; judge for herself,
he thought, padding about the room in his socks,
smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to
Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls,
or he might settle in and read an absorbing book
written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And
if he did retire, that’s what he’d do — write books.
He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bod*
leian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl rain
to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand;
vainly cried she didn’t care a straw what people
said. There he was, the man she thought the world
of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the dis-
tinguished (and his age made not the least differ-
ence to her), padding about a room in an hotel in
Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he
took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the
Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two
little matters that interested him. And he would
have a chat with whoever it might be, and so come

MRS. DALLOWAY

* 4 ®

to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch,
and miss engagements, and when Daisy asked him,
as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up to
the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to
her) — in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess
said, that she should forget him, or merely remem-
ber him as he was in August 1922, like a figure
standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows
more and more remote as the dog-cart spins away,
carrying her securely fastened to the back seat,
though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees
the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out
how she would do anything in the world, anything,
anything, anything. . . .

He never knew what people thought. It became
more and more difficult for him to concentrate. He
became absorbed; he became busied with his own
concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on
women, absent-minded, moody, less and less able
(so he thought as he shaved) to understand why
Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and
be nice to Daisy; introduce her. And then he could
just — just do what? just haunt and hover (he was
at the moment actually engaged in sorting out vari-
ous keys, papers), swoop and taste, be alone, in
short, sufficient to himself; and yet nobody of course

MRS. DALLOWAY

241

was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his
waistcoat) ; it had been his undoing. He could not
keep out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked
golf, liked bridge, and above all women’s society,
and the fineness of their companionship, and their
faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving
which though it had its drawbacks seemed to him
(and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top
of the envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid
a flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet
he could not come up to the scratch, being always
apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped some-
thing in him permanently), and to tire very easily
of mute devotion and to want variety in love,
though it would make him furious if Daisy loved
anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncon-
trollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tor-
tures! But where was his knife; his watch; his
seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s letter which he
would not read again but liked to think of, and
Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.

They were eating.

Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not
dressed, with their shawls and bags laid beside them,
with their air of false composure, for they were not
used to so many courses at dinner, and confidence,

MRS. DALLOWAY

242

for they were able to pay for it, and strain, for they
had been running about London all day shopping,
sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they
looked round and up as the nice-looking gentleman
in horn-rimmed spectacles came in, and their good
nature, for they would have been glad to do any
little service, such as lend a time-table or impart
useful information, and their desire, pulsing in
them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to
establish connections if it were only a birthplace
(Liverpool, for example) in common or friends of
the same name; with their furtive glances, odd
silences, and sudden withdrawals into family jocu-
larity and isolation; there they sat eating dinner
when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a
little table by the curtain.

It was not that he said anything, for being soli-
tary he could only address himself to the waiter;
it was his way of looking at the menu, of pointing
his forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching him-
self up to the table, of addressing himself seriously,
not gluttonously to dinner, that won him their re-
spect; which, having to remain unexpressed for the
greater part of the meal, flared up at the table
where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh was heard
to say at the end of the meal, “Bartlett pears.”

MRS. DALLOWAY

243

Why he should have spoken so moderately yet
firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within
his rights which are founded upon justice, neither
young Charles Morris, nor old Charles, neither Miss
Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he said,
“Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt
that he counted on their sup; lort in some lawful de-
mand; was champion of a cause which immediately
became their own, so that their eyes met his eyes
sympathetically, and when they all reached the
smoking-room simultaneously, a little talk between
them became inevitable.

It was not very profound — only to the effect that
London was crowded; had changed in thirty years;
that Mr. Morris preferred Liverpool; that Mrs.
Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show,
and that they had all seen the Prince of Wales.
Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family in the world
can compare with the Morrises ; none whatever ; and
their relations to each other are perfect, and they
don’t care a hang for the upper classes, and they
like what they like, and Elaine is training for the
family business, and the boy has won a scholar-
ship at Leeds, and the old lady (who is about his
own age) has three more children at home; and
they have two motor cars, but Mr. Morris still

MRS. DALLOWAY

244

mends the boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is abso-
lutely superb, thought Peter Walsh, swaying a little
backwards and forwards with his liqueur glass in
his hand among the hairy red chairs and ash-tiays,
feeling very well pleased with himself, for the Mor-
rises liked him. Yes, they liked a man who said,
“Bartlett pears.” They liked him, he felt.

He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises
moved off; but they would meet again.) He would
go to Clarissa’s party, because he wanted to ask
Richard what they were doing in India — the con-
servative duffers. And what’s being acted? And
music. ... Oh yes, and mere gossip.

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought,
our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies
among obscurities threading her way between the
boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and
on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; sud-
denly she shoots to the surface and sports on the
wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need
to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What
did the Government mean — Richard Dalloway
would know — to do about India?

Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys
went by with placards proclaiming in huge red
letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker chairs

MRS. DALLOWAY 245

were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping,
smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat
there. One might fancy that day, the London day,
was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped
off her print dress and white apron to array herself
in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff,
took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same
sigh of exhilaration that a wo man breathes, tumbling
petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour;
the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting,
succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there
among the thick foliage of the squares an intense
light hung. I resign, the t vening seemed to say,
as it paled and faded abo\e the battlements and
prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and
block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I dis-
appear, but London would have none of it, and
rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, con-
strained her to partnership in her revelry.

For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer
time had taken place since Peter Walsh’s last visit
to England. The prolonged evening was new to
him. It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young
people went by with their despatch-boxes, awfully
glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this
famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if

MRS. DALLOWAY

346

you like, but all the same rapture, flushed their
faces. They dressed well too; pink stockings;
pretty shoes. They would now have two hours at
the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the
yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the
square shone lurid, livid — they looked as if dipped
in sea water — the foliage of a submerged city. He
was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging
too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by
rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental
Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world,
here was he, as young as ever; envying young
people their summer time and the rest of it, and
more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from
a housemaid’s laughter — intangible things you
couldn’t lay your hands on — that shift in the whole
pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had
seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed;
weighed them down, the women especially, like those
flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press be-
tween sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littre’s dic-
tionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner.
She was dead now. He had heard of her, from
Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so
fitting — one of nature’s masterpieces — that old Mi9S
Parry should turn to glass. She would die like

MRS. DALLOWAY

*47

some bird in a frost gripping her perch. She be-
longed to a different age, but being so entire, so
complete, would always stand up on the horizon,
stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some
past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage,
this interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a
paper and read about Surrey tnd Yorkshire — he had
held out that copper millions of times. Surrey was
all out once more) — this interminable life. But
cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important.
He could never help reading about cricket. He read
the scores in the stop press first, then how it was
a hot day, then about a murder case. Having done
things millions of times enriched them, though it
might be said to take the surface off. The past en-
riched, and experience, and having cared for one
or two people, and so having acquired the power
which the young lack, of cutting short, doing what
one likes, not caring a rap what people say and
coming and going without any very great expecta'
tions (he left his paper on the table and moved off),
which however (and he looked for his hat and coat)
was not altogether true of him, not to-night, for
here he was starting to go to a party, at his age,
with the belief upon him that he was about to have
an experience. But what?

MRS. DALLOWAY

a+8

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the
eye. It was not beauty pure and simple — Bedford
Place leading into Russell Square. It was straight-
ness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a
corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano,
a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-mak-
ing hidden, but now and again emerging when,
through the uncurtained window, the window left
open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young
people slowly circling, conversations between men
and women, maids idly looking out (a strange com-
ment theirs, when work was done), stockings dry-
ing on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorb-
ing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And
in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved
sq quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, em-
bracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree;
that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one
passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of
some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would
have been impious. That was interesting. And so
on into the flare and glare.

His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with
indescribable idiosyncrasy, lent a little forward,
tripped, with his hands behind his back and hig

MRS. DALLOWAY

249

eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped through
London, towards Westminster, observing.

Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were
being opened here by a footman to let issue a high'
stepping old dame, in buckled shoes, with three
purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were be-
ing opened for ladies wrapped like mummies in
shawls with bright flowers on them, ladies with bar«
heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco
pillars through small front pardens lightly swathed
with combs in their hair (having run up to see the
children), women came; men waited for them, with
their coats blowing open, and the motor started.
Everybody was going out. What with these doors
being opened, and the descent and the start, it
seemed as if the whole of London were embarking
in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the
waters, as if the whole place were floating off in
carnival. And Whitehall was skated over, silver
beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there
was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it was
so hot that people stood about talking. And here
in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably,
sitting four square at his house door dressed all in
white. An Anglo-Indian presumably.

MRS. DALLOWAY

350

And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken
women; here only a policeman and looming houses,
high houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments,
and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow
misty cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s;
cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round
the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to
him because they bore people going to her party,
Clarissa’s party.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him
now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let
the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The
brain must wake now. The body must contract
now, entering the house, the lighted house, where
the door stood open, where the motor cars were
standing, and bright women descending: the soul
must brave itself to endure. He opened the big
blade of his pocket-knife.

Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having
just nipped in to the drawing-room to smooth a
cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a moment and
feel whoever came in must think how clean, how
bright, how beautifully cared for, when they saw
the beautiful silver, the brass fire-irons, the new
chair-covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz: she

MRS. DALLOWAY

351

appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people
already coming up from dinner; she must fly!

The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so
she had heard them say in the dining-room, she said,
coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it matter, did
it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or
less? It made no difference at this hour of the night
to Mrs. Walker among the plates, saucepans, cul-
lenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream
freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup
tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard
they washed up in the sculle ry seemed to be all on
top of her, on the kitchen table, on chairs, while
the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared,
and still supper had to be laid. All she felt was,
one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap
of difference to Mrs. Walker.

The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy;
the ladies were going up, one by one, Mrs. Dallo-
way walking last and almost always sending back
some message to the kitchen, “My love to Mrs.
Walker,” that was it one night. Next morning they
would go over the dishes — the soup, the salmon;
the salmon, Mrs. Walker knew, as usual under-
done, for she always got nervous about the pudding
and left it to Jenny; so it happened, the salmon was

MRS. DALLOWAY

25a

always underdone. But some lady with fair hair
and silver ornaments had said, Lucy said, about the
entree, was it really made at home? But it was
the salmon that bothered Mrs. Walker, as she spun
the plates round and round, and pulled in dampers
and pulled out dampers; and there came a burst
of laughter from the dining-room; a voice speak-
ing; then another burst of laughter — the gentlemen
enjoying themselves when the ladies had gone. The
tokay, said Lucy running in. Mr. Dalloway had
sent for the tokay, from the Emperor’s cellars, the
Imperial Tokay.

It was borne through the kitchen. Over her
shoulder Lucy reported how Miss Elizabeth looked
quite lovely; she couldn’t take her eyes off her; in
her pink dress, wearing the necklace Mr. Dalloway
had given her. Jenny must remember the dog, Miss
Elizabeth’s fox-terrier, which, since it bit, had to be
shut up and might, Elizabeth thought, want some-
thing. Jenny must remember the dog. But Jenny
was not going upstairs with all those people about.
There was a motor at the door already! There was
a ring at the bell — and the gentlemen still in the
dining-room, drinking tokay!

There, they were going upstairs; that was the
first to come, and now they would come faster and

MRS. DALLOWAY

*53

faster, so that Mrs. Parkinson (hired for parties)
would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would
be full of gentlemen waiting (they stood waiting,
sleeking down their hair) while the ladies took their
cloaks off in the room along the passage; where
Mrs. Barnet helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who
had been with the family for forty years, and came
every summer to help the ladies, and remembered
mothers when they were girls, and though very un-
assuming did shake hands; said “milady” very re-
spectfully, yet had a humoro is way with her, look-
ing at the young ladies, and ever so tactfully helping
Lady Lovejoy, who had som< trouble with her un-
derbodice. And they could not help feeling, Lady
Lovejoy and Miss Alice, that some little privilege
in the matter of brush and comb, was awarded them
having known Mrs. Barnet — “thirty years, milady,”
Mrs. Barnet supplied her. Young ladies did not use
to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy, when they stayed at
Bourton in the old days. And Miss Alice didn’t
need rouge, said Mrs. Barnet, looking at her fondly.
There Mrs. Barnet would sit, in the cloakroom,
patting down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish
shawls, tidying the dressing-table, and knowing per-
fectly well, in spite of the furs and the embroideries,
which were nice ladies, which were not. The dear

354 MRS. DALLOWAY

old body, said Lady Lovejoy, mounting the stairs,
Clarissa’s old nurse.

And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and
Miss Lovejoy,” she said to Mr. Wilkins (hired for
parties). He had an admirable manner, as he bent
and straightened himself, bent and straightened him-
self and announced with perfect impartiality “Lady
and Miss Lovejoy ... Sir John and Lady Need-
ham . . . Miss Weld . . . Mr. Walsh.” His man-
ner was admirable; his family life must be irre-
proachable, except that it seemed impossible that
a being with greenish lips and shaven cheeks could
ever have blundered into the nuisance of children.

“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She
said it to every one. How delightful to see you!
She was at her worst — effusive, insincere. It was
a great mistake to have come. He should have
stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter
Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should
have stayed at home, for he knew no one.

Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete
failure, Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord
Lexham stood there apologising for his wife who
had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden
party. She could see Peter out of the tail of her
eye, criticising her, there, in that corner. Why,

MRS. DALLOWAY

255

after all, did she do these things? Why seek pin-
nacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it con-
sume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better
anything, better brandish one’s torch and hurl it
to earth than taper and dwindle away like some
Ellie Henderson! It was extraordinary how Peter
put her into these states just by coming and stand-
ing in a corner. He made her see herself; exag-
gerate. It was idiotic. But why did he come, then,
merely to criticise? Why always take, never give?
Why not risk one’s one little point of view? There
he was wandering off, and she must speak to him.
But she would not get the ch ance. Life was that —
humiliation, renunciation. W hat Lord Lexham was
saying was that his wife would not wear her furs
at the garden party because “my dear, you ladies
are all alike” — Lady Lexham being seventy-five at
least! It was delicious, how they petted each other,
that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexham.
She did think it mattered, her party, and it made
her feel quite sick to know that it was all going
wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion,
any horror was better than people wandering aim-
lessly, standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie
Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves up-

MRS. DALLOWAY

256

Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of
Paradise blew out and it seemed as if there were
a flight of wings into the room, right out, then
sucked back. (For the windows were open.) Was
it draughty, Elbe Henderson wondered? She was
subject to chills. But it did not matter that she
should come down sneezing to-morrow; it was the
girls with their naked shoulders she thought of,
being trained to think of others by an old father,
an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he was dead
now; and her chills never went to her chest, never.
It was the girls she thought of, the young girls
with their bare shoulders, she herself having always
been a wisp of a creature, with her thin hair and
meagre profile; though now, past fifty, there was
beginning to shine through some mild beam, some-
thing purified into distinction by years of self-
abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her
distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose
from three hundred pounds’ income, and her weapon-
less state (she could not earn a penny) and it made
her timid, and more and more disqualified year by
year to meet well-dressed people who did this sort
of thing every night of the season, merely telling
their maids “I’ll wear so and so,” whereas Elbe
Henderson ran out nervously and bought cheap pink

MRS. DALLOWAY

257

flowers, half a dozen, and then threw a shawl over
her old black dress. For her invitation to Clarissa’s
party had come at the last moment. She was not
quite happy about it. She had a sort of feeling that
Clarissa had not meant to ask her this year.

Why should she? There was no reason really,
except that they had always known each other. In'
deed, they were cousins. But naturally they had
rather drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought after.
It was an event to her, going to a party. It was
quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes. Wasn’t
that Elizabeth, grown up, wit a her hair done in the
fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet she could
not be more than seventeen. She was very, very
handsome. But girls when they first came out
didn’t seem to wear white as they used. (She must
remember everything to tell Edith.) Girls wore
straight frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well
above the ankles. It was not becoming, she
thought.

So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson
craned rather forward, and it wasn’t so much she
who minded not having any one to talk to (she
hardly knew anybody there), for she felt that they
were all such interesting people to watch; politicians
presumably; Richard Dalloway’s friends; but it was

138 MRS. DALLOWAY

Richard himself who felt that he could not let the
poor creature go on standing there all the evening
by herself.

“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you?”
he said in his genial way, and Ellie Henderson, get-
ting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was
extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her,
said that many people really felt the heat more than
the cold.

“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”

But what more did one say?

“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by
the elbow, and, good Lord, there was old Peter, old
Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see him — ever
so pleased to see him! He hadn’t changed a bit.
Apd off they went together walking right across the
room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn’t
met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watch-
ing them go, certain she knew that man’s face. A
tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wear-
ing spectacles, with a look of John Burrows. Edith
would be sure to know.

The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise
blew out again. And Clarissa saw — she saw Ralph
Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn’t
a failure after all! it was going to be all right now — •

MRS. DALLOWAY

*59

her party. It had begun. It had started. But it
was still touch and go. She must stand there for
the present. People seemed to come in a rush.

Colonel and Mrs. Garrod . . . Mr. Hugh Whit-
bread . . . Mr. Bowley . . . Mrs. Hilbery . . .
Lady Mary Maddox . . . Mr. Quin . . . intoned
Wilkin. She had six or seven words with each,
and they went on, they went into the rooms; into
something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had
beat back the curtain.

And yet for her own part, it was too much of
an effort. She was not enjoying it. It was too much
like being — just anybody, standing there; anybody
could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire,
couldn’t help feeling that she had, anyhow, made
this happen, that it marked a stage, this post that
she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough
she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but
felt herself a stake driven in at the top of her
stairs. Every time she gave a party she had this
feeling of being something not herself, and that
every one was unreal in one way; much more red
in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes,
partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly
the background, it was possible to say things you
couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an ef-

260 MRS. DALLOWAY

fort; possible to go much deeper. But not for her;
not yet anyhow.

“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old
Sir Harry! He would know every one.

And what was so odd about it was the sense one
had as they came up the stairs one after another,
Mrs. Mount and Celia, Herbert Ainsty, Mrs.
Dakers — oh and Lady Bruton!

“How awfully good of you to come!” she said,
and she meant it — it was odd how standing there
one felt them going on, going on, some quite old,
some . . .

What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth
was Lady Rosseter?

“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton!
§ally Seton! after all these years! She loomed
through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like that,
Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water
can, to think of her under this roof, under this roof!
Not like that!

All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing,
words tumbled out — passing through London; heard
from Clara Haydon; what a chance of seeing you!
So I thrust myself in — without an invitation. . . .

One might put down the hot water can quite com-
posedly. The lustre had gone out of her. Yet

MRS. DALLOWAY

261

it was extraordinary to see her again, older, happier,
less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek
then that, by the drawing-room door, and Clarissa
turned, with Sally’s hand in hers, and saw her rooms
full, heard the roar of voices, saw the candlesticks,
the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard
had given her.

“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.

She had the simplest egotism, the most open de-
sire to be thought first always, and Clarissa loved
her for being still like that. “I can’t believe it 1 ”
she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the
thought of the past.

But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins
was emitting in a voice of commanding authority as
if the whole company must be admonished and the
hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:

“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.

The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Hen-
derson marvelled. What a thing to tell Edith!

One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordi-
nary. You might have stood him behind a counter
and bought biscuits — poor chap, all rigged up in
gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds,
first with Clarissa then with Richard escorting him,
he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It

MRS. DALLOWAY

a6a

was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him.
They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain
that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones,
this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all
stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and
die looked very fine too, very stalwart in her lace,
swam up, and they withdrew into a little room which
at once became spied upon, guarded, and a sort of
stir and rustle rippled through every one, openly:
the Prime Minister!

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought
Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they
loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage 1
There! That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh Whit-
bread, snuffing round the precincts of the great,
grown rather fatter, rather whiter, the admirable
Hugh!

He looked always as if he were on duty, thought
Peter, a privileged, but secretive being, hoarding
secrets which he would die to defend, though it was
only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a
court footman, which would be in all the papers to-
morrow. Such were his rattles, his baubles, in play-
ing with which he had grown white, come to the
verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection
of all who had the privilege of knowing this type of

MRS. DALLOWAY a6j

the English public school man. Inevitably one made
up things like that about Hugh; that was his style;
Hie style of those admirable letters which Peter had
read thousands of miles across the sea in the Times,
and had thanked God he was out of that pernicious
hubble-bubble if it were only to hear baboons chat-
ter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned
youth from one of the Universities stood ob-
sequiously by. Him he would patronise, initiate,
teach how to get on. For h<' liked nothing better
than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old
ladies palpitate with the joy of being thought of in
their age, their affliction, thinking themselves quite
forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving up and
spending an hour talking of the past, remembering
trifles, praising the home-made cake, though Hugh
might eat cake with a Duchess any day of his life,
and, to look at him, probably did spend a good deal
of time in that agreeable occupation. The All-judg-
ing, the All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh
had no mercy. Villains there must be, and God
knows the rascals who get hanged for battering the
brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the
whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness. Look
at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and
scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton

MRS. DALLOWAY

*64

emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he
was privileged to say something, something private,
to Lady Bruton as she passed. She stopped. She
wagged her fine old head. She was thanking him
presumably for some piece of servility. She had
her toadies, minor officials in Government offices
who ran about putting through little jobs on her
behalf, in return for which she gave them luncheon.
But she derived from the eighteenth century. She
was all right.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister
down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the state-
liness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a
silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the
waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having
that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in
the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf
in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed,
all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature
floating in its element. But age had brushed her;
even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the
setting sun on some very clear evening over the
waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her
severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all
warmed through now, and she had about her as
die said good-bye to the thick gold-laced man who

MRS. DALLOWAY

265

was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look
important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite
cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well,
and must now, being on the very verge and rim of
things, take her leave. So she made him think.
(But he was not in love.)

Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been
good to come. And, walking down the room with
him, with Sally there and Peter there and Richard
very pleased, with all those people rather inclined,
perhaps, to envy, she had felt that intoxication of
the moment, that dilatation >f the nerves of the
heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright*

t

— yes, but after all it was what other people felt,
.that; for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and
sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear
old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant),
had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not
in the heart; and it might be that she was growing
old but they satisfied her no longer as they used;
and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister go
down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua pic-
ture of the little girl with a muff brought back Kil-
man with a rush; Kilman her enemy. That was
satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her —
hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power;

266 MRS. DALLOWAY

Elizabeth’s seducer; the woman who had crept in
to steal and defile (Richard would say, What non-
sense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was
enemies one wanted, not friends — not Mrs. Durrant
and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw, Miss
Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw com-
ing upstairs). They must find her if they wanted
her. She was for the party!

There was her old friend Sir Harry.

“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine
old fellow who had produced more bad pictures than
any other two Academicians in the whole of St.
John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing
in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying,
for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising
'of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, “the Ap-
proach of the Stranger” — all his activities, dining
out, racing, were founded on cattle standing absorb-
ing moisture in sunset pools).

“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For
Willie Titcomb and Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty
were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry could not
tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her;
of her type he thought her perfect, and threatened
to paint her) his stories of the music hall stage. He
chaffed her about her party. He missed his brandy.

MRS. DALLOWAY 26 f

These circles, he said, were above him. But he liked
her; respected her, in spite of her damnable, difficult
upper-class refinement, which made it impossible to
ask Clarissa Dalloway to sit on his knee. And up
came that wandering will-o -the-wisp, that vagulous
phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her
hands to the blaze of his laughter (about the Duke
and the Lady), which, as she heard it across the
room, seemed to reassure her on a point which some-
times bothered her if she woke early in the morn*
ing and did not like to call her maid for a cup of
tea; how it is certain we must die.

“They won’t tell us theii stories,” said Clarissa.

“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She
looked to-night, she said, so like her mother as she
first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat.

And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her
mother, walking in a garden! But alas, she
must go.

For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on
Milton, talking to little Jim Hutton (who was un-
able even for a party like this to compass both tie
and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even
at this distance they were quarrelling, she could see.
For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With
all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him

,i68 MRS. DALLOWA?

and the scribblers he suspected instantly an atmos-
phere not favourable to his queer compound; his
prodigious learning and timidity; his wintry charm
without cordiality; his innocence blent with snob-
bery; he quivered if made conscious by a lady’s un-
kempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very
creditable doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young
people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a
little toss of the head, with a sniff — Humph! — the
value of moderation; of some slight training in the
classics in order to appreciate Milton. Professor
Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off
with little Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his
black being at the laundry) about Milton. She in-
terrupted.

She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That
was the bond between them, and Hutton (a very
bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far
the best of the great ladies who took an interest
in art. It was odd how strict she was. About music
she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig.
But how charming to look at! She made her house
so nice if it weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa
had half a mind to snatch him off and set him down
at the piano in the back room. For he played
divinely.

MRS. DALLOWAY

269

“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”

“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding ur-
banely, the Professor stepped delicately off.

“He knows everything in the whole world about
Milton,” said Clarissa.

“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imi-
tate the Professor througho it Hampstead; the Pro-
fessor on Milton; the Professor on moderation; the
Professor stepping delicately off.

But she must speak to tl. it couple, said Clarissa,
Lord Gayton and Nancy Plow.

Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of
the party. They were not miking (perceptibly) as
they stood side by side by the yellow curtains.
They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and
never had very much to say in any circumstances.
They looked; that was all. That was enough. They
looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom
of powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with
the eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass him
or stroke surprise him. He struck, he leapt, ac-
curately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths quivered at
the end of his reins. He had his honours, ancestral
monuments, banners hanging in the church at home.
He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and sisters;
had been all day at Lords, and that was what they

270 MRS. DALLOWAY

were talking about — cricket, cousins, the movies —
when Mrs. Dalloway came up. Lord Gayton liked
her most awfully. So did Miss Blow. She had
such charming manners

“It is angelic — it is delicious of you to have
cornel ” she said. She loved Lords; she loved youth,
and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the
greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if
her body had merely put forth, of its own accord,
a green frill.

“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.

For the young people could not talk. And why
should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at
dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress the
snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and
streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous re-
sources of the English language, the power it be-
stows, after all, of communicating feelings (at their
age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the
evening), was not for them. They would solidify
young. They would be good beyond measure to
the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather
dull.

“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have
dancing.”

It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have

MRS. DALLOWAY

271

cornel But talk of dancing! The rooms were
packed.

There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas,
she must leave them — Lord Gay ton and Nancy
Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.

For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry
was alive. She was past eighty. She ascended
staircases slowly with a st ck. She was placed in
a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had
known Burma in the ’seventies were always led up
to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to
be such friends. For at the mention of India, or
even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly
deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings —
she had no tender memories, no proud illusions
about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies — it was orchids
she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried
on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary
peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling
blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted
in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman,
fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped
a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation
over orchids and her own figure journeying in the
Sixties in India — but here was Peter.

*72 MRS. DALLOWAY

“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,”
said Clarissa.

And yet he had not had a word with her all the
evening!

“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him
up to Aunt Helena, in her white shawl, with her
stick.

“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.

That meant nothing.

Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was
noisy; but Clarissa had asked her. So she had
come. It was a pity that they lived in London —
Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health
it would have been better to live in the country.
But Clarissa had always been fond of society.

' “He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.

Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles
Darwin had said about her little book on the orchids
of Burma.

(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)

No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the
orchids of Burma, but it went into three editions
before 1870, she told Peter. She remembered him
now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left
her, Peter Walsh remembered, without a word m

MRS. DALLOWAY

273

the drawing-room that night when Clarissa had
asked him to come boating).

“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said
Clarissa to Lady Bruton.

“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady
Bruton replied. “He help :d me to write a letter.
And how are you?”

“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady
Bruton detested illness in 'he wives of politicians.)

“And there’s Peter WaCh!” said Lady Bruton
(for she could never thinl of anything to say to
Clarissa; though she liked ! er. She had lots of fine
qualities; but they had n ithing in common — she
and Clarissa. It might have been better if Richard
had married a woman with less charm, who would
have helped him more in his work. He had lost his
chance of the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!”
she said, shaking hands with that agreeable sinner,
that very able fellow who should have made a name
for himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with
women), and, of course, old Miss Parry. Wonder-
ful old lady!

Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a
spectral grenadier, draped in black, inviting Peter
Wabh to lunch; cordial; but without small talk,

274 MRS. DALLOWAY

remembering nothing whatever about the flora or
fauna of India. She had been there, of course; had
stayed with three Viceroys; thought some of the
Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what
a tragedy it was — the state of India! The Prime
Minister had just been telling her (old Miss Parry
huddled up in her shawl, did not care what the
Prime Minister had just been telling her), and
Lady Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s
opinion, he being fresh from the centre, and she
would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it
prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of
it, the wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s
daughter. She was an old woman now, not good
for much. But her house, her servants, her good
friend Milly Brush — did he remember her? — were
all there only asking to be used if — if they could
be of help, in short. For she never spoke of Eng-
land, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was
in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if
ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot
the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled
with indomitable justice barbarian hordes and lain
under a shield noseless in a church, or made a green
grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman

MRS. DALLOWAY

375

was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and
9ome truancy, too, of the logical faculty (she found
it impossible to write a letter to the Times), she had
the thought of Empire always at hand, and had
acquired from her association with that armoured
goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of de-
meanour, so that one could not figure her even in
death parted from the earth or roaming territories
over which, in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack
had ceased to fly. To be not English even among
the dead — no, no! Impo sible!

But was it Lady Bruvon (whom she used to
know)? Was it Peter Walsh grown grey? Lady
Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton).
It was old Miss Parry certainly — the old aunt who
used to be so cross when she stayed at Bourton.
Never should she forget running along the passage
naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And
Clarissa! oh Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.

Clarissa stopped beside them.

“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later.
Wait,” she said, looking at Peter and Sally. They
must wait, she meant, until all these people had
gone.

“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old

MRS. DALLOWAY

2 76

friends, Sally and Peter, who were shaking hands,
and Sally, remembering the past no doubt, was
laughing.

But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing rich-
ness; her eyes not aglow as they used to be, when
she smoked cigars, when she ran down the passage
to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of cloth-
ing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the
gentlemen had met her? But everybody forgave
her. She stole a chicken from the larder because
she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in
her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt.
But everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa).
It was her warmth; her vitality — she would paint,
she would write. Old women in the village never
to this day forgot to ask after “your friend in the
red cloak who seemed so bright.” She accused Hugh
Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old
triend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassa-
dor), of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish
her for saying that women should have votes. Vul-
gar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered
having to persuade her not to denounce him at fam-
ily prayers — which she was capable of doing with
her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love
of being the centre of everything and creating

MRS. DALLOWAY

27 ?

scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to
end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyr-
dom; instead of which she had married, quite un-
expectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who
owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester.
And she had five boys!

She and Peter had settled down together. They
were talking: it seemed so familiar — that they
should be talking. They would discuss the past.
With the two of them (more even than with Rich-
ard) she shared her past; the garden; the trees; old
Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any voice;
the drawing-room wallpapei ; the smell of the mats.
A part of this Sally must always be; Peter must
always be. But she must leave them. There were
the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go
up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing
like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for
invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s
wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and
say . . .

But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.

“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we
hardly dared to come in,” she said.

And Sir William, who looked very distinguished,
with his grey hair and blue eyes, said yes; they had

*r8 MRS. DALLOWAY

not been able to resist the temptation. He was talk-
ing to Richard about that Bill probably, which they
wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the
sight of him, talking to Richard, curl her up? He
looked what he was, a great doctor. A man abso-
lutely at the head of his profession, very powerful,
rather worn. For think what cases came before
him — people in the uttermost depths of misery;
people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives.
He had to decide questions of appalling difficulty.
Yet — what she felt was, one wouldn’t like Sir
William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.

“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady
Bradshaw.

He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Brad-
shaw, because of the mumps. His father minded
even more than he did, she thought “being,” she
said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”

Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard.
He did not look like a boy — not in the least like
a boy. She had once gone with some one to ask
his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely
sensible. But Heavens — what a relief to get out to
the street again ! There was some poor wretch sob-
bing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But she
did not know what it was — about Sir William; what

MRS. DALLOWAY

279

exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her,
“didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell.” But
he was extraordinarily able. They were talking
about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was men-
tioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon
what he was saying about the deferred effects of
shell shock. There must be some provision in the
Bill.

Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into
the shelter of a common femininity, a common pride
in the illustrious qualities c f husbands and their sad
tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose
— one didn’t dislike her) murmured how, “just as
we were starting, my husband was called up on the
telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is
what Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed
himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought
Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death,
she thought.

She went on, into the little room where the Prime
Minister had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps
there was somebody there. But there was nobody.
The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Min-
ister and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he
sitting four-square, authoritatively. They had been
talking about India. There was nobody. The

MRS. DALLOWAY

a So

party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was
to come in alone in her finery.

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death
at her party? A young man had killed himself.
And they talked of it at her party — the Bradshaws,
talked of death. He had killed himself — but how?
Always her body went through it first, when she
was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed,
her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a
window. Up had flashed the ground; through him,
blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There
he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then
a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But
why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked
of it at her party!

* She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine,
never anything more. But he had flung it away.
They went on living (she would have to go back;
the rooms were still crowded; people kept on com-
ing). They (all day she had been thinking of
Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old.
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own
life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.
This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death
was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the

MRS. DALLOWAY

281

Impossibility of reaching the centre which, mysti-
cally, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture
faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in
death.

But this young man who had killed himself—
had he plunged holding hi treasure? “If it were
now to die, ’twere now to 1 e most happy,” she had
said to herself once, com inf. down in white.

Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose
he had had that passion and had gone to Sir
William Bradshaw, a grea doctor yet to her ob-
scurely evil, without sex < r lust, extremely polite
to women, but capable of some indescribable out-
rage — forcing your soul, th it was it — if this young
man had gone to him, and S;r William had impressed
him, like that, with his power, might he not then
have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made
intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like
that?

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there
was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s
parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be
lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there
was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even
now, quite often if Richard had not been there read-
ing the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird

28a MRS. DALLOWAY

and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeas-
urable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with
another, she must have perished. But that young
man had killed himself.

Somehow it was her disaster — her disgrace. It
was her punishment to see sink and disappear here
a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness,
and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.
She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never
wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady
Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had
walked on the terrace at Bourton.

It was due to Richard; she had never been so
happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing
last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought,
straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on
the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of
youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find
it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the
day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton
when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or
seen it between people’s shoulders at dinner; seen
it in London when she could not sleep. She walked
to the window.

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her
own in it, this country sky, this sky above West-

MRS. DALLOWAY

283

minster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh,
but how surprising! — in the room opposite the old
lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed.
And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had
thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its
cheek in beauty. But then; it was — ashen pale,
raced over quickly by taperii g vast clouds. It was
new to her. The wind must have risen. She was
going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinat-
ing to watch her, moving abo ;t, that old lady, cross-
ing the room, coming to th> window. Could she
see her? It was fascinating, with people still laugh-
ing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that
old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled
the blind now. The clock began striking. The
young man had killed himself; but she did not pity
him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two,
three, she did not pity him, with all this going on.
There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole
house was dark now with this going on, she re-
peated, and the words came to her, Fear no more
the heat of the sun. She must go back to them.
But what an extraordinary night! She felt some-
how very like him — the young man who had killed
himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown
it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles

*84 MRS. DALLOWAY

dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty;
made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She
must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And
she came in from the little room.

“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sit-
ting on the sofa with Sally. (After all these years
he really could not call her “Lady Rosseter.”)
“Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked.
“Where’s Clarissa?”

Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter
of that, that there were people of importance, poli-
ticians, whom neither of them knew unless by sight
in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be
nice to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet
there was Richard Dalloway not in the Cabinet.
He hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For her-
self, she scarcely ever read the papers. She some-
times saw his name mentioned. But then — well,
she lived a very solitary life, in the wilds, Clarissa
would say, among great merchants, great manufac-
turers, men, after all, who did things. She had done
things too!

“I have five sons ! ” she told him.

Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the
softness of motherhood; its egotism too. Last time
they met, Peter remembered, had been among the

MRS. DALLOWAY

285

cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like rough
bronze” she had said, with her literary turn; and
she had picked a rose. She had marched him up
and down that awful night, after the scene by the
fountain; he was to catch the midnight train.
Heavens, he had wept !

That was his old trick., ipening a pocket-knife,
thought Sally, always openiig and shutting a knife
when he got excited. They had been very, very in-
timate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love
with Clarissa, and there w; 5 that dreadful, ridicu-
lous scene over Richard D illoway at lunch. She
had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call
Richard “Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and
indeed they had never seen each other since, she
and Clarissa, not more than half a dozen times
perhaps in the last ten years. And Peter Walsh
had gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely
that he had made an unhappy marriage, and she
didn’t know whether he had any children, and she
couldn’t ask him, for he had changed. He was
rather shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and
she had a real affection for him, for he was con-
nected with her youth, and she still had a little
Emily Bronte he had given her, and he was to
write, surely? In those days he was to write.

286 MRS. DALLOWAY

‘‘Have you written?” she asked him, spreading
her hand, her firm and shapely hand, on her knee in
a way he recalled.

“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she
laughed.

She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally
Seton. But who was this Rosseter? He wore two
camellias on his wedding day — that was all Peter
knew of him. “They have myriads of servants,
miles of conservatories,” Clarissa wrote; something
like that. Sally owned it with a shout of laughter.

“Yes, I have ten thousand a year” — whether be-
fore the tax was paid or after, she couldn’t remem-
ber, for her husband, “whom you must meet,” she
said, “whom you would like,” she said, did all that
for her.

And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had
pawned her grandmother’s ring which Marie An-
toinette had given her great-grandfather to come to
Bourton.

Oh yes, Sally remembered ; she had it still, a ruby
ring which Marie Antoinette had given her great-
grandfather. She never had a penny to her name
In those days, and going to Bourton always meant
some frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had
meant so much to her — had kept her sane, she be-

MRS. DALLOWAY 287

lieved, so unhappy had she been at home. But that
was all a thing of the past — all over now, she said.
And Mr. Parry was dead; and Miss Parry was still
alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life l
said Peter. He had been quite certain she was
dead. And the marriage had been, Sally supposed,
a success? And that very handsome, very self-
possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over there,
by the curtains, in red.

(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she
was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking.
Oh how much nicer to be m the country and do
what she liked! She could hear her poor dog howl-
ing, Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a bit like
Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.

“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.

What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed
Clarissa an enormous amount. They had been
friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she still saw
Clarissa all in white going about the house with her
hands full of flowers — to this day tobacco plants
made her think of Bourton. But — did Peter un-
derstand? — she lacked something. Lacked what
was it? She had charm; she had extraordinary
charm. But to be frank (and she felt that Peter
was an old friend, a real friend — did absence mat*

288 MRS. DALLOWAV

ter? did distance matter? She had often wanted
to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he under-
stood, for people understand without things being
said, as one realises growing old, and old she was,
had been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton,
where they had the mumps), to be quite frank then,
how could Clarissa have done it? — married Richard
Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for
dogs. Literally, when he came into the room he
smelt of the stables. And then all this? She waved
her hand.

Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white
waistcoat, dim, fat, blind, past everything he looked,
except self-esteem and comfort.

“He’s not going to recognise us,” said Sally, and
really she hadn’t the courage — so that was Hughl
the admirable Hugh!

“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.

He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles
at Windsor, Peter told her. Peter kept his sharp
tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter said.
That kiss now, Hugh’s.

On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-
room one evening. She went straight to Clarissa in
a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa said,
the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without

MRS. DALLOWAY 289

exception the most beautiful she had ever seen —
and now his evening dress. Perfect! And had he
children?

“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,”
Peter told her, except himsel f . He, thank God, had
none. No sons, no daughters, no wife. Well, he
didn’t seem to mind, said Sal y. He looked younger,
she thought, than any of the n.

But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways,
Peter said, to marry like that; “a perfect goose she
was,” he said, but, he said, ‘ we had a splendid time
of it,” but how could that be 5 Sally wondered; what
did he mean? and how odd t was to know him and
yet not know a single thing that had happened to
him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely,
for after all it must be galling for him (though he
was an oddity, a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary
man), it must be lonely at his age to have no home,
nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them for
weeks and weeks. Of course he would; he would
love to stay with them, and that was how it came
out. All these years the Dalloways had never been
once. Time after time they had asked them.
Clarissa (for it was Clarissa of course) would not
come. For, said Sally, Clarissa was at heart a snob
— one had to admit it, a snob. And it was that that

MRS. DALLOWAY

290

was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa
thought she had married beneath her, her husband
being — she was proud of it — a miner’s son. Every
penny they had he had earned. As a little boy (her
voice trembled) he had carried great sacks.

(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after
hour; the miner’s son; people thought she had mar-
ried beneath her; her five sons; and what was the
other thing — plants, hydrangeas, syringas, very, very
rare hibiscus lilies that never grow north of the
Suez Canal, but she, with one gardener in a suburb
near Manchester, had beds of them, positively bedsl
Now all that Clarissa had escaped, unmaternal as
she was.)

A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where
''was she, all this time? It was getting late.

“Yet,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was
giving a party, I felt I couldn’t not come — must see
her again (and I’m staying in Victoria Street, prac-
tically next door). So I just came without an invi-
tation. But,” she whispered, “tell me, do. Who is
this?”

It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For
how late it was getting! And, she murmured, as
the night grew later, as people went, one found old
friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest

MRS. DALLOWAY

291

views. Did they know, she asked, that they were
surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and
trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky.
Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said,
in the back garden! But she was a magician! It
was a park. . . . And she die n’t know their names,
but friends she knew they were, friends without
names, songs without words, always the best. But
there were so many doors, si.ch unexpected places,
she could not find her way.

“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was
that? that lady standing by the curtain all the eve-
ning, without speaking? He knew her face; con-
nected her with Bourton. Surely she used to cut
up underclothes at the large table in the window?
Davidson, was that her name?

“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally.
Clarissa was really very hard on her. She was a
cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard on people.

She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in
her emotional way, with a rush of that enthusiasm
which Peter used to love her for, yet dreaded a
little now, so effusive she might become — how gen-
erous to her friends Clarissa was! and what a rare
quality one found it, and how sometimes at night
ot on Christmas Day, when she counted up he*

MRS. DALLOWAY

292

blessings, she put that friendship first. They were
young; that was it. Clarissa was pure-hearted; that
was it. Peter would think her sentimental. So
she was. For she had come to feel that it was the
only thing w r orth saying — what one felt. Cleverness
was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what
I feel.”

Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa
come and talk to them? That was what he was
longing for. She knew it. All the time he was
thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his
knife.

He had not found life simple, Peter said. His
relations with Clarissa had not been simple. It
had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so inti-
mate — he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say
it.) One could not be in love twice, he said. And
what could she say? Still, it is better to have loved
(but he would think her sentimental — he used to be
so sharp). He must come and stay with them in
Manchester. That is all very true, he said. All
very true. He would love to come and stay with
them, directly he had done what he had to do in
London.

And Clarissa had cared for him more than she

MRS. DALLOWAY 293

bad ever cared for Richard. Sally was positive of
that.

“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have
said that — she went too far). That good fellow — •
there he was at the end of the room, holding forth,
the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he
talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-
looking man? Living in th wilds as she did, she
had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were.
But Peter did not know. H did not like his looks,
he said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all,
Richard seemed to him the ’jest, he said — the most
disinterested.

“But what has he done? ’ Sally asked. Public
work, she supposed. And were they happy together?
Sally asked (she herself was extremely happy); for,
she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only
jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can
one know even of the people one lives with every
day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She
had read a wonderful play about a man who
scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt
that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.
Despairing of human relationships (people were so
difficult), she often went into her garden and got
from her flowers a peace which men and women

MRS. DALLOWAY

894

never gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages;
he preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the
young are beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth
cross the room. How unlike Clarissa at her age!
Could he make anything of her? She would not
open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted.
She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of
a pool. But Peter did not agree that we know noth-
ing. We know everything, he said; at least he did.

But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming
now (and really she must go, if Clarissa did not
come soon), this distinguished-looking man and his
rather common-looking wife who had been talking
to Richard — what could one know about people like
that?

' “That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter,
looking at them casually. He made Sally laugh.

But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to
look at a picture. He looked in the corner for the
engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir William
Bradshaw was so interested in art.

When one was young, said Peter, one was too
much excited to know people. Now that one was
old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in
body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of
twenty) ; now that one was mature then, said Peter,

MRS. DALLOWAY

29s

Me could watch, one could understand, and one
did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that
is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more pas-
sionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas,
perhaps, but one should be glad of it — it went on
increasing in his experience. There was some one
in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He
would like Sally to know her She was married, he
laid. She had two small children. They must all
come to Manchester, said Sally — he must promise
before they left.

There’s Elizabeth, he said, she feels not half what
we feel, not yet. But, said Sally, watching Elizabeth
go to her father, one can see they are devoted to
each other. She could feel it by the way Elizabeth
went to her father.

For her father had been looking at her, as he
stood talking to the Bradshaws, and he had thought
to himself, Who is that lovely girl? And suddenly
he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not
recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink
frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she
talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and
they stood together, now that the party was almost
over, looking at the people going, and the rooms get-
ting emptier and emptier, with things scattered o*

*96 MRS. DALLOWAY

the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly
last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she
had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And
Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was over,
but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he
had not meant to tell her, but he could not help
telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he
had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was
his daughter I That did make her happy. But her
poor dog was howling.

“Richard has improved. You are right,” said
Sally. “I shall go and talk to him. I shall say good-
night. What does the brain matter,” said Lady
Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a
moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?
he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with
extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.

THE END